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THE EASTER HOPE 

OR 

THE LIFE IMMORTAL 



THE EASTER HOPE 

OR 

THE LIFE IMMORTAL 



By*&* 
Rev. ANDREW W* ARCHIBALD, D. D. 

Author of 

" The Bible Verified," " The Trend of the Centuries," 

•« Biblical Nature Studies," ** The Modern Man Facing the Old Problems ' 



* For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 

Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that 

would be." —Tennyson 



NEW EDITION 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE JUDSON PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS NEW YORK 

LOS ANGELES KANSAS CITY SEATTLE 



^ 






Copyright, 1918, by 
GILBERT N. BRINK, Secretary 



Published December, 1918 



JAN -8 1319 

©OU510291 

*"Wi7 I 



TO 

IN COMMEMORATION OF 

MORE THAN FORTY YEARS OF WEDDED LIFE 

1876 MAY EIGHTEENTH 1918 



IN MEMORY 

ALSO 

OF A BELOVED SON 

FEBRUARY 25,. 1880 JUNE 20, I908 



PREFACE 



Tennyson's " In Memoriam," which has greatly 
quickened faith in the life immortal, grew out of 
the seemingly untimely death of the gifted young 
Hallam. The present volume had a similar origin, 
in an excruciatingly sorrowful experience of the 
author, when there was a mysterious and tragical 
taking away of a son, who had recently grad- 
uated from Dartmouth College, who had supple- 
mented this training with the culture that comes 
from a trip of six months in the Orient and 
through Europe, and who had just entered upon 
a business career. 

The book at first may be said to have had 
in a sense a private printing, for it came, not 
from a regular publishing house, but from an 
individual whose output in the main consists of 
church-membership cards, baptismal and marriage 
certificates, and the like. Though thus meant as a 
kind of personal memorial, it was most favorably 
noticed by the press and by persons of eminence, 
and it met with a considerable sale, being in a 
second edition when a disastrous fire wiped out 
everything, leaving only a few damaged copies. 
The thought has occurred that what was intended 
for a rather restricted use might serve a wider 



Preface 

public by eliminating the biographical sketch, and 
the portrait, and the appreciation by President 
Tucker of Dartmouth, while also other changes 
and additions, some of them suggested by the tre- 
mendous experiences of men in the world war, 
have seemed appropriate. 

It may be fitting, however, to recall briefly the 
tragedy which gave rise to the volume. The son 
in 1908, with three other young men, had gone 
on a camping vacation in the high Sierras of Cali- 
fornia, in the region of the King's River Canon, 
where there are Alpine altitudes. On June twen- 
tieth he started out alone for an all-day climb, and 
when he failed to return as he had planned, 
his three companions began a search, and the 
alarm being given they were soon joined by a 
dozen others, who hunted by day, and slept on the 
ground wherever overtaken by the night. More 
than two weeks of systematic searching proved in 
vain, absolutely no trace of the lost one hav- 
ing been gotten. Whether he stumbled into some 
rushing torrent or into* some mountain lake, or 
whether he fell from some dizzy height, some 
towering granite cliff, seemed likely never to be 
revealed. His disappearance seemed as inexplica- 
ble as that of Moses, when he went " unto mount 
Nebo, to the top of Pisgah," where his life was 
ended, " but no man knoweth of his sepulcher 
unto this day. 3 ' 

With tearful solemnity were recalled the poet's 
lines : 



Preface 

. 

By Nebo's lonely mountain, 

On this side Jordan's wave, 
In a vale in the land of Moab, 

There lies a lonely grave; 
But no man dug that sepulcher, 

And no man saw it e'er, 
For the angels of God upturned the sod, 

And laid the dead man there. 

And had he not high honor? 

The hillside for his pall; 
To lie in state while angels wait, 

With stars for tapers tall; 
And the dark rock pine, like tossing plumes, 

Over his bier to wave ; 
And God's own hand, in that lonely land, 

To lay him in the grave, 

In that deep grave, without a name, 

Whence his uncoffined clay 
Shall break again — Oh wondrous thought ! 

Before the judgment day; 
And stand with glory wrapped around, 

On the hills he never trod, 
And speak of the strife that won our life 

With the incarnate Son of God. 

More than two weary years had passed away, 
when in July of 1910 a Sierra party of nearly two 
hundred went on a vacation in the same vicinity, 
to which the four young men in 1908 had pene- 
trated. An encampment was made on the lower 
end of Rae Lake. At the upper part of this body 
of water rose Mt. Rixford, which one of the 
company was setting out to climb, when, July 
twentieth, he came upon the remains and pos- 



Preface 

sessions of some person who evidently had per- 
ished there. The identification was made positive 
by a drinking-cup with the initials, K. A., and by 
a watch similarly marked, given him on his six- 
teenth birthday by his parents, who still recall the 
kiss he gave each of them in expression of his 
appreciation and his delight at the simple gift. 
The conclusion reached by those who investigated 
was, that the long-lost son probably had been 
suddenly overwhelmed by an avalanche of snow, 
which covered him and concealed his body from 
the searchers of two years before, who had 
traversed this very ground. The very meager 
remains that were found, only a few of the smaller 
bones, were conveyed back east, and were tenderly 
interred in the family lot in the Fair Haven 
Cemetery of New Haven, Conn., Joseph's injunc- 
tion of long centuries before regarding himself 
having been carried out, " Ye shall carry up my 
bones from hence." 

All this led the writer to inquire anew as to 
the future, and it furnished the dark background 
whereon to project the brightness of the Christian 
hope, even as the black and ominous storm-cloud 
only displays to better advantage the cheering and 
radiant rainbow. He turns with considerable re- 
lief from sociological problems and questions of 
environment to what has sometimes been slight- 
ingly termed " other-worldliness," which indeed 
is becoming a timely subject from the scientific 
side in view of the studies of to-day on psychical 



Preface 

research. He feels again the appealing force of 
the example set, according to Xenophon, by Cyrus 
the Great. This model ruler of antiquity, on 
nearing his end, talked to friends and relatives 
about immortality in words which Cicero after- 
ward quoted for their beauty and truth. " You 
cannot surely believe," he said, " that when I 
have ended this mortal life, I shall cease to exist. 
Even in lifetime you have never seen my soul; 
you have only inferred its existence. And there 
are grounds for inferring the continuance of the 
soul after death.' ' It is to this thought that the 
attention of the reader is herein invited. 

Like the crisis in which the writer was, like 
the dark vale from which he emerged into the 
light shed by an assured conviction of a glorious 
immortality, is the agonizing situation in which 
not a few individuals but countless thousands 
find themselves because of the world war that has 
now been raging for over four years. Never have 
so many been constrained to give serious attention 
to the beyond. This could not be otherwise with 
soldiers and sailors and aviators by the hundred 
thousand " going west," as they have expressed 
it, since the tragic struggle involving nearly all 
mankind began. An expert statistician connected 
with a great trust company, from his study of 
the list of casualties, reckons the dead alone, for 
four years of the international conflict, at eight 
and a half millions, to which, since this computa- 
tion' was made, additions are rapidly being made. 



Preface 

America in a year and a half nearly has be- 
come deeply involved. With half a million in 
our navy, with three millions in our army, half of 
them already overseas September i, 1918, with 
five millions to be under arms, and with four 
millions of these to be in France, by the middle 
of the coming year, we can see what multitudes 
are being brought to give, as Lincoln in his 
Gettysburg address said, " the last full measure 
of devotion " to God and country. All these are 
being forced by the exigencies of the present to 
put their lives in jeopardy. They know not what 
their destiny may be. All their kindred and 
friends are distressed because of the dread possi- 
bilities speaking of large numbers whose years are 
bound to be cut short, although they are also filled 
with pride at the exhibition of such bravery and 
loyalty. 

There are, of course, rich compensations in 
the thought of serving humanity, of staying a 
cruel and brutal despotism, of advancing the cause 
of liberty and Christian civilization. Nevertheless 
we cannot help being impressed with the seem- 
ingly premature hurrying into eternity of a vast 
host that cannot be numbered. Even that, how- 
ever, may not be all disaster. It is difficult for us 
to realize that Paul may have been right, and 
that he may have been stating an actual fact, 
when he said so positively, " To die is gain." 
There are consolations in the promise of a future, 
which may indeed be so much better than our 



Preface 

terrestrial existence here as to remove the sting 
of death and rob mortality of its apparent victory. 
It is this aspect of the matter which these pages 
consider. 

This volume will have answered its purpose 
if it offers to* the clergy suggestions for Easter 
messages, if it conveys to> the laity cheer regarding 
the mysterious hereafter, if it carries to all who 
have been bereaved in the ordinary course of 
nature the deep comfort which their stricken 
hearts crave, and especially if it heartens those 
who have been perturbed by the present world 
crisis with its enormous demand upon human lives. 
The " crossing of the bar," upon a proper reflec- 
tion, can come to be regarded as life's greatest 
and most beautiful " adventure," to use the figure 
of one of the Lusitania's victims, who in spite of 
friendly demurrers did not hesitate to go on what 
(by warning notices of the German embassy in the 
daily papers on the eve of sailing) had really 
been advertised as a doomed ship. There can be 
Tennyson's entire equanimity, when there is his 
religious faith, which enabled him to say, 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea. 



I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crossed the bar. 

A. W. A. 

Newton Center, Boston. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Resurrection of Christ i 

II. The Resurrection in Nature 21 

III. Immortality and the Resurrection. 41 

IV. The Resurrection of the Body 57 

V. The Bearing of Evolution on the 

Resurrection Hope 73 

VI. A Threefold Resurrection 85 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 



In the reign of Caesar Augustus there appeared 
a remarkable character on the stage of action. 
On reaching manhood his claims included the 
restoring of sight to the blind, of hearing to 
the deaf, of health to the sick, and even of life 
to the dead. That he did these wonderful works, 
or appeared to do them, seemed to be conceded 
by all. At first the people only marveled, but 
gradually they formed into two distinct parties. 
The one party believed that the works were done 
by divine power, the other insisted that it was 
through Satanic agency, or through trickery of 
some sort, as he was pronounced a " deceiver." 

The person who was the cause of this divided 
sentiment, was Jesus. Those who- rallied about 
him were for the most part plain, honest people, 
who thought for themselves. Among them were 
many, who with a whole-hearted independence 
had formerly rushed off into dissipation, but who 
now were leading reformed lives. These con- 
stituted what may be called the popular party. 
Arrayed against Jesus were, with few exceptions, 
the chief men of the nation, together with a hot- 
headed rabble, ever ready to do the bidding of 
their priests, and the Pharisees being here the 

[3] 



The Easter Hope 



ruling element ( for they were the spiritual guides 
of the uneducated masses), this may be desig- 
nated as the Pharisaic party. 

Feeling ran high. Events followed one an- 
other in rapid succession, until on a Friday after- 
noon Jesus was hanging on a cross between two 
robbers. The Pharisaic party was jubilant, tri- 
umphant. The popular party was broken and 
scattered, nothing remaining of it except some 
personal followers whose hopes of a kingdom 
were all blasted, notwithstanding the fact that 
their leader had foretold his crucifixion, and had 
even declared that he would rise the third day. 
His words they remembered, but they seem to 
have thought that his language was in nature 
parabolic and figurative, for he often spoke in 
parables and figures. 

How could he rise? For to make assurance 
of his death doubly sure, his very heart had been 
pierced by a soldier's lance. All that his faithful 
friends were now concerned about was to give 
him decent and kindly burial. With heavy hearts 
they laid him away in a sepulcher hewn out of the 
solid rock. With great exultation, under the cir- 
cumstances, could the scribes and the Pharisees 
refer sarcastically to the King of the Jews, and yet 
they were not entirely at ease. Recollecting the 
prophecy of a resurrection, they were afraid lest 
his disciples should abduct the body, and then 
claim that the prediction had been fulfilled. They, 
therefore, had everything made secure, the seal 



[4] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



of the great Roman Empire being applied to the 
closed tomb, and a military guard being appointed 
to prevent by soldierly vigilance any fraud. No 
more chance for deception! The deceiver was 
hemmed in at last ! Exposure was certain. With 
the tomb sealed, and with soldiers pacing con- 
stantly to and fro, the world would be imposed 
upon no longer. 

Friday night, all of Saturday, and Saturday 
night passed. Sunday morning there was great 
excitement. Wild rumors were flying through 
the air. People were running hither and thither, 
hardly knowing where they went. Soldiers gath- 
ered in little knots, and talked in low and hurried 
tones. On the way from the city to the sepulcher 
sped along a woman, followed by two men who 
soon outstripped her in the race. What was the 
news? Why, the body of Jesus was gone, the 
grave was empty ! How could that be ? Around 
the council hall, where were gathered the priests 
and rulers, it was reported that the previous night 
the guard all fell asleep, and awoke to< find the 
body gone. Here and there was a group of dis- 
ciples, despondent, because all that remained of 
their Master had been borne away by hostile 
hands, as they supposed, to be laid they knew not 
where. And so the multitude was agitated by the 
conflicting reports, until ere long there came an- 
other message of a resurrection, " The Lord is 
risen indeed." What was the truth? If Christ 
actually rose, let the evidence be produced. Let 



[5] 



The Easter Hope 



us have the facts, whether they go for or against 
a resurrection. Call up the witnesses. 

First, let the soldiers, who watched at the 
rocky vault, take the stand. What is their testi- 
mony? " His disciples came by night, and stole 
him away while we slept." But it was to prevent 
that very thing that they were placed on duty, 
and that circumstance of itself throws some dis- 
credit upon their story. Then the Roman pun- 
ishment for a soldier who fell asleep at his post 
was death; and yet they would have us believe 
that not one but all of them dropped off into 
a deep slumber. 

They were asleep, were they? How, then, 
did they know that the disciples had been there? 
They must have dreamed it, and of course dreams 
are very reliable testimony. Where did they 
get that extra money which they were known to 
have? There certainly was a strong appearance 
of their having been bribed to- concoct the story 
they told. They were particular, too, to explain 
that it was " by night " when the whole thing 
happened, and when they fell asleep. Had it not 
been for that explanatory clause, "by night," 
they might be supposed to have been slumbering 
at noonday. How often persons volunteer infor- 
mation which is incriminating, and which is a sure 
sign of guilt ! 

A few years ago a Connecticut murderess, 
Lydia Sherman, escaped from jail, and in arrest- 
ing her the officer without a word simply pointed 

[6] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



to an article in her possession with the initials, 
L. S., whereupon she quickly spoke up, " That 
does not say Lydia Sherman." He had not said 
that it did; he merely called attention to the in- 
itials, and her gratuitous explanation proved that 
she was the very one wanted. So the soldiers 
volunteered information, added a saving or ex- 
planatory clause, which plainly showed that they 
were falsifying : " His disciples came by night, . . 
while we slept" Just as if they might have been 
sleeping in broad daylight ! Let the soldiers leave 
the stand, no court can receive such evidence as 
they give. 

Let Mary Magdalene be the next witness. 
What is her story as gathered from the records? 
She had been a devoted follower of Jesus, and 
a complete revolution had been wrought in her 
character. She was present at the cross. She 
saw the place of burial Friday afternoon. She 
Hastened home to prepare sweet spices, with 
which, when Saturday or the Jewish Sabbath was 
passed, she might return to embalm the body of 
her Lord. At daybreak on Sunday she with other 
women approached the sepulcher to perform the 
last sad offices of affection for the dead, somewhat 
as we carry flowers to decorate the brown earth, 
before the grass has grown green over the mound 
that covers some dear one, and before the heart 
has forgotten its grief. 

It was a question with the sorrowing women 
how the great stone could be removed, but on 



m 



The Easter Hope 



drawing near Mary saw it was already rolled 
back. In great alarm she ran to tell Peter and 
John that the Jews had probably removed the 
body, she knew not where. She followed back 
after the two disciples, who hastened to the spot, 
and she remained weeping at the tomb after they 
had gone away. As she wept because they had 
taken away her Lord, a person whom she sup- 
posed to be the gardener asked her the cause of 
her sorrow, and she begged him, if he had re- 
moved the body, to let her take the precious re- 
mains. To this the apparent stranger replied 
with the simple mention of her name, " Mary," 
and the familiar address brought from her a 
rapturous recognition. She hastened to tell the 
disciples that she had seen the Lord, no longer 
dead but risen, while they called her words 
only " idle talk," and made no secret of their 
disbelief. 

Such is the testimony of Mary Magdalene, and 
strong evidence it is. It lias no appearance of 
being manufactured. She did not have certain 
hopes, and then make her story fit in there- 
with. On the contrary everything was against her 
expectations. She expected to cover with spices 
the remains of her Master, but she was disap- 
pointed in this task of reverential love. Her first 
thought, on seeing the stone rolled away, was that 
the Jews had stolen the body, and that accordingly 
was the first report which she carried back to the 
disciples. Not till she had actually seen the Lord 



[8] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



himself, did she announce that he had risen. Thus 
so far from trying to manufacture evidence, she 
could hardly be made to believe the revelation of 
her own eyes. Had she gone to the grave with a 
strong desire to see Jesus alive, the desire might 
have been father to the belief. In a highly ner- 
vous condition she might have imagined to be a 
fact what she fondly hoped would be one. But 
instead of expecting to find Jesus risen, she ex- 
pected to find him dead, and she was proposing to 
anoint the dead. 

Nor was she, on account of what is sometimes 
termed feminine susceptibility, persuaded into her 
new belief by the stronger, more determined mas- 
culine nature; she, for instance, did not owe her 
belief to the disciples, for she was convinced be- 
fore them, and they were the ones who " dis- 
believed " her, when she carried to them the 
news of the resurrection. So that: there seems to 
be no flaw in the evidence of Mary Magdalene. 
Her story is plain, simple, straightforward. Let 
'her pass from the stand. 

The next to be called to tell " the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth," will be 
Cleopas and a companion of his, who on a Sun- 
day afternoon took that historic walk to Emmaus. 
They had been informed of the rumor circulated 
by the women, and of its partial confirmation by 
Peter and John, who certainly had found the 
grave empty, but who as yet had not seen the 
Lord himself, and therefore the two doubted, until 



[9] 



The Easter Hope 



at a friendly meal they had the proof of their own 
eyes. 

Their familiar narrative, whether true or not, 
at any rate runs along in a most natural way. 
There is at least the appearance of truth in all the 
minute circumstances given : the setting out on 
foot to a village, the stranger coming up to them, 
their surprise at his ignorance and his reproof of 
their unbelief, their invitation to him to stop 
with them overnight as his movements indicated 
that he was going on past where they were turning 
in to abide ; the sitting down to a table for supper, 
the asking of a blessing and the wonderful revela- 
tion therein ; the hurrying back to Jerusalem, the 
going to a meeting of disciples there, the excited 
greeting exchanged — all these details show gen- 
uineness. A fabrication would not have brought 
in so many little side incidents, which are re- 
lated without any apparent purpose, and Which 
had nothing to do with the main issue. Cleopas 
and his friend evidently recited real events, and 
did not ingeniously weave together a tissue of 
falsehoods in support of a pious fraud. 

Then at that first Easter evening meeting of dis- 
ciples, Tiow reluctant they were to believe the story 
of the two who came hurrying back from Em- 
maus ! How slow likewise they were to receive 
the testimony of Peter, who declared to them that 
there had been an appearance to him also on 
that same Sunday. They were all talking ex- 
citedly together, and when in the midst of the ani- 

[10] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



mated discussion Jesus suddenly appeared to 
themselves, they thought it was a spirit, a ghost, 
until he ate in their presence like any other person 
with flesh and bones, with a veritable existence, 
and they were compelled to give credence to such 
a palpable manifestation. 

But there was one persistent doubter; let him 
be called up; let Thomas take the stand. He 
had lost all hope, he had given up everything. 
He refused to meet with the other disciples on 
that first Sunday night. A whole week he went 
about, a rank skeptic. He was acquainted with the 
reports of the resurrection, but he rejected them 
utterly. He would not accept the testimony of 
those with whom he had been intimately asso- 
ciated, and that, too, though they went to him 
personally, and declared most solemnly that they 
had with their own eyes seen the Lord. He would 
not be satisfied with any evidence short of put- 
ting his own fingers in the prints of the nails 
and in the pierced side. 

On the return of the next Sunday evening, he 
was offered by Jesus, who appeared again, the 
very proof he had demanded, whereupon there 
came that burst of conviction, " My Lord and 
my God ! " Such is the evidence of a man natu- 
rally skeptical, of one who was sure to see all the 
difficulties of the case, who refused in so im- 
portant a matter to rely upon the judgment of 
his most trusted friends, who declared that he 
must see and handle for himself. Such testimony 

en] 



The Easter Hope 



in the estimation of the world is worth some- 
thing. It is not the fancy of a good but ex- 
citable nature. It is not the opinion of a credulous 
mind, but it is the verdict of a sound, cautious 
judge. 

Shall any more witnesses be sworn on this 
case? We might, if necessary, bring forward 
seven men, who on the shore after a night's fish- 
ing on the lake, breakfasted and talked with 
Christ. We could present the evidence of James, 
who was an own brother of the Lord, who still re- 
mained an unbeliever at the time of the cruci- 
fixion, but who had such an indisputable manifes- 
tation made to him, that he at last was convinced. 
He was long the head of the Jerusalem church, 
while he also wrote part of the New Testament in 
the epistle bearing his name. We could cite more 
than five hundred, to whom there was a simul- 
taneous appearance on an appointed mountain in 
Galilee, and of whom Paul, writing more than 
twenty years afterward, said that most of them 
were still living, ready to give any who might 
be doubters, as they had formerly been, their per- 
sonal testimony of a sure conviction, from what 
they had seen and heard. Indeed the appearances 
of Christ were at intervals for all of forty days, at 
the end of which time he was seen to ascend bodily 
into heaven. Still later, Saul the persecutor was 
transformed into Paul the apostle by a miraculous 
appearance unto him on the way to Damascus. 

Taking all this mass of evidence, it stands 

[12] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



overwhelmingly in favor of the resurrection, if 
only the witnesses were trustworthy. That they 
were good and noble, that they were sincere, no 
one doubts. They were willing to die, and some 
did die for the resurrection. But they may have 
been deluded, it is suggested, for the history of 
the different religions shows that multitudes have 
died for a cherished doctrine. Now on doctrines, 
opinions, people may be mistaken, but the resur- 
rection was not a question of doctrine or opinion, 
but of fact. To us even, it is not like original sin, 
for instance, a matter of opinion, but of testi- 
mony, and to the eye-witnesses themselves it was 
not a question of testimony but of fact. The 
senses, sight and touch, were the tests, and with 
such tests the first witnesses declared the resur- 
rection to have actually occurred. 

But may not a man die on a question of fact 
even, and still die for a falsehood? May not a 
murderer die with an assertion of innocence, 
while his guilt is positively known? Yes, but it 
is with the hope of saving his life, that is, it is 
for the sake of gain. But what gain was there to 
the disciples on the question of fact? Nothing 
but suffering and death ; in other words, there was 
no gain. We therefore, can conclude that no event 
in history is better attested than the resurrection 
of Christ. The proof could not very well be 
stronger. 

The only way tot escape the force of their testi- 
mony is to suppose that the witnesses were labor- 



[13] 



The Easter Hope 



ing under some hallucination, just as now some- 
times an individual imagines he sees things which 
are only the creations of his disordered fancy. 
There are fatal objections to this theory. Hallu- 
cinations are apt to occur in the dark, where- 
as the appearances of Christ were generally in the 
daytime. Of the ten recorded manifestations, 
only two of them are mentioned as occurring at 
night, and those were at early evening meetings. 
Moreover, hallucinations are not likely to affect 
so many minds exactly alike. It was under dif- 
ferent circumstances and by different persons that 
Christ was seen. At the same time, the vision of 
him was granted to a sufficient number simulta- 
neously to make their evidence mutually cor- 
roborative. One person might have been mis- 
taken, two or three might have been, but more 
than five hundred are not likely to have been. 

Nor could the resurrection have been merely a 
resuscitation. It was no recovery from an ap- 
parent death, from a swoon. After a scourging 
which was brutal in the extreme, after the sink- 
ing under the cross, after six hours of agony 
thereon, after the sword-thrust when the life- 
blood followed the removal of the cold steel, and 
after a portion of three days in a closed tomb, it 
could have been no case of suspended animation. 

Besides, if Christ did not really die and rise 
again, he ought to have corrected that impression, 
which certainly was made. A good man would 
not have let any such deception go abroad. 



[14] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



Imagine Socrates, after drinking the hemlock and 
after apparent death, reviving and then letting it 
be published that he had risen from the dead. 
How quickly he would be taken from the lofty 
pedestal upon which he has been placed by an ad- 
miring world, if he were found guilty of any 
such trickery. Now Christ is universally es- 
teemed and honored, as he could not and would 
not be, if he encouraged people to- believe in his 
resurrection, when he was never actually dead. 

Moreover, his resurrection is a necessary belief 
to explain the subsequent results. Never could 
those few scattered disciples at the crucifixion have 
been rallied, never would their timidity have given 
place to a courage which faced hardship and peril 
and persecution and death ; never would the gos- 
pel have gone forth to such magnificent victories, 
had it not been for the wonderful fact of Christ's 
resurrection. It is not strange that an English 
deist, who took up the resurrection of the Lord 
with the intention, by establishing its falsity, of 
overthrowing Christianity itself, became himself 
a convert, being actually forced to believe by the 
mass of evidence presented. With glad con- 
fidence, therefore, we can say at each recurring 
Easter, " The Lord is risen indeed." We can 
accept the conclusion of the famous Doctor 
Arnold : " I have been used for many years to 
study the history of other times, and to examine 
and weigh the evidences of those who have writ- 
ten about them; and I know of no one fact in the 



[15] 



The Easter Hope 



history of mankind which is proved by better 
and fuller evidence of every sort, to the mind of 
the fair inquirer, than that Christ died, and rose 
again from the dead." 

We thus have rightly laid our solid foundation 
in the historic fact of the Lord's own rising, and 
we can agree with Pres. W. Douglas Mackenzie, 
of Hartford Theological Seminary, who has said : 
" It seems to me a most evident fact that wher- 
ever faith in the resurrection of Christ has dis- 
appeared, the idealistic arguments for immor- 
tality have begun at once to lose their convincing 
power. The nerve of their life has been cut." 

The writer has stood at the last resting-place 
of many distinguished dead, but at only one tomb 
has he had a sense of triumph. He has been 
within the splendid mausoleum of General U. S. 
Grant on New York's Riverside Drive overlook- 
ing the lordly Hudson. He has been under the 
dome of the diurch of the Invalides in Paris to 
note where lie the mortal remains of Napoleon 
the Great. He felt that both those great com- 
manders met with ignominious and final defeat. 

He has entered London's Westminster Abbey, 
and has been filled, as Addison said in the Specta- 
tor, " with a kind of melancholy," as the " speak- 
ing marbles " called to mind those who had been 
lying there anywhere from one to six hundred 
years. He has visited the Campo Santo in 
Genoa, where extensive corridors and artistic 
aisles and sculptured figures remind of art gal- 

[16] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



leries with many a masterpiece, but even there 
the tragic appears in some realistic form in 
marble weeping over a loss to which reconcilia- 
tion is not easy. In both these cases one feels 
the vanity of life. 

The author has likewise gone to see in Rome 
the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, who died 30 B. C, 
and who was slumbering beneath that identical 
and well-preserved pile of one hundred and four- 
teen feet in height, when Paul passed that way. 
He has gone over the Appian way to witness a 
round tower seventy feet in diameter, the still 
existing tomb of Cecilia Metella, who was thus 
commemorated two thousand years ago, and of 
whom Byron said : 

Thus much alone we know — Metella died, 

The wealthiest Roman's wife : behold his love or pride. 

At neither of these sights is there a triumphant 
feeling. 

We have also gone down into Egypt. We were 
not at all impressed with the thought of victory 
in the pyramids commemorating monarchs who 
reigned five to six millenniums ago. We have 
seen in a glass case at the Cairo Museum the 
mummy of Menephtah, the supposed Pharaoh of 
the Exodus, who, if destroyed with all his host 
in the Red Sea. (though this is not asserted in 
Scripture), seems to have had his body recovered 
and embalmed, for there he lies, with his fringe 

[17] 



The Easter Hope 



of white hair around the base of a bald crown, 
and with his teeth all gone except one upper 
front, while now none are so poor as to do him 
reverence. There remains only a mockery of his 
former greatness. So too, in viewing Rameses 
the Great, the Pharaoh of the Oppression, one 
finds himself repeating the striking lines of 
Horace Smith: 

And thou hast walked about — how strange a story ! 

In Thebes' streets three thousand years ago 
When the Memnonium was in its glory, 

And time had not begun to overthrow 
Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous, 
Of which the very ruins are tremendous. 

Is there no other immortality -than that of such 
mummied forms? 

Or, one can go out from hundred-gated Thebes, 
from its site, to the Tombs of the Kings, and 
enter that of Amenophis the Second, predecessor 
of the Pharaoh who built " Vocal Memnon," 
which was long said to emit at daybreak a harp- 
like sound, a fabled music that has been the in- 
spiration of poets ever since. There he will see 
this monarch just where he has been reposing for 
three thousand five hundred years, his leathery 
features to-day being illumined by an electric 
light, shining down over him from a ceiling 
almost as fresh in its decorations now as when 
first made three and a half millenniums ago. 
Surely this is a survival only of the grotesque. 

[18] 



The Resurrection of Christ 



Once more, we go to Palestine. At Bethany 
we descend into a cave, reputed to be that from 
which Lazarus came forth, but to which he had 
to return. We ride out to the Saviour's birth- 
place, and on the road we pass Rachel's tomb, not 
improbably at the original location, and the tears 
almost start yet at the pathetic narrative in 
Genesis : " And Rachel died, and was buried on 
the way to Ephrath (the same is Beth-lehem). 
And Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave; the 
same is the pillar of Rachel's grave unto this day." 
Thus were human hopes blasted again. We drive 
on to Hebron, where Abraham bought the cave of 
Machpelah, in which to bury Sarah. Over it has 
stood a mosque since the thirteenth century, and 
though Turkish misrule does not allow any one 
to enter the sepulchral cavern that is covered, 
Dean Stanley believed that, if admission ever 
were gained to' the innermost shrine, there would 
be found " one at least of the patriarchal family " 
still " intact," " the embalmed body of Jacob," 
which he himself before his decease directed to be 
brought thither from Egypt. But even such a 
gruesome find would have in it nothing of vic- 
tory. 

And now finally we go to the Holy Sepulcher, 
not to that Which Helena, the mother of the 
Emperor Constantine, wrongly located in the 
fourth century, and for which the Crusaders long 
fought to rescue it from infidel hands, for that 
is within the ancient walls of old Jerusalem. 



[19] 



The Easter Hope 



Rejecting this traditional site that has been ac- 
cepted for sixteen centuries, we follow many 
modern scholars in identifying " the green hill far 
away, without a city wall," with the grassy knoll 
just outside the Damascus gate, northward of 
the holy city. Its grottoes make cavernous eyes 
that, aside from the rounded form of the hillock, 
give it still more the appearance of a human 
skull, so that it might well be called " the place 
of a skull." Never can we forget going to this 
Calvary. The quiet, flowering garden at its base, 
and the rock-hewn sepulcher there, seemed to 
meet all the conditions. Reverently we entered 
the sacred shine, and tearfully we recalled the 
words of the angel, '" Come, see the place where 
the Lord lay," and the emotions excited were 
well-nigh overwhelming. At this tomb only of 
all those we had seen at one time or another, 
did we have a jubilant, victorious feeling, as once 
more through memory was heard the ringing 
Easter message : " Why seek ye the living among 
the dead? He is not here, but is risen." 



[20] 



II 

THE RESURRECTION IN NATURE 



THE RESURRECTION IN NATURE 



The inspired Song of Songs in one of its most 
exquisite descriptions says : 

The flowers appear on the earth; 

The time of the singing of birds is come, 

And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land ; 

The fig-tree ripeneth her green figs, 

And the vines are in blossom; 

They give forth their fragrance. 

John Burroughs, in a different strain, but in a 
no less charming manner, sets forth the glory of 
the reawakened world, when he draws this pic- 
ture of a frequent June scene in his native Dela- 
ware County up in the Catskills : " Where the 
bobolinks are singing and the daisies dancing in 
the wind, and the scent of the clover is in the 
air, and where the boys and girls are looking for 
wild strawberries in the grass," We are to con- 
sider the spiritual significance of this newness of 
life, which is an annual feature of the material- 
istic cosmos. 

The resurrection in nature every spring is pro- 
phetic of the transfiguration awaiting redeemed 
humanity. We can say with Thomson in his 
" Seasons " : 

[23] 



The Easter Hope 



Forth in the pleasing spring 
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love. 
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; 
Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; 
And every sense and every heart is joy. 

Easter fittingly comes at this jubilant season, and 
the natural world gives at least, as Wordsworth 
has expressed it, " Intimations of Immortality." 
Fig tree and vine are instanced in the poetic 
song of Solomon as examples of the reviving 
of nature in general. What a transformation is 
wrought in the springtime! The winter speaks 
of northern blasts, of sleet and snow and ice, or 
of frozen and brown vegetation everywhere, and 
of leafless trees and cheerless landscapes. But 
when the south winds begin to blow, the green 
carpet of the earth is renewed, the buds swell 
and soon unfold in fresh foliage. Fruit trees 
come into bloom. The delicate pink and white of 
apple blossoms appear, and every zephyr is loaded 
with fragrance. Every breeze wafts to us sweet 
scents and aromatic odors. A stupendous miracle 
would the vernal and balmy spring appear, if it 
were a sudden creation. Were the desolation of 
winter to be changed in a night as by an en- 
chanter's wand into the tropical beauty of the 
next succeeding season in the rolling year, we 
should be more impressed than we are by the 
gradualness to which we are accustomed. If the 
omnipotence displayed in the resurrection of na- 
ture were fully recognized, our faith would be 



[24] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



strengthened in the promise that we too after 
our last sleep shall awake in beauty, even in the 
divine likeness. 

Think of the power that shoots up myriads of 
blades of grass, that makes the stripped forests 
again to wave with a luxuriant foliage, that un- 
loosens from their hidden receptacles all the per- 
fumes of Arabia, and one cannot doubt that we 
also can be changed by the same Almightiness. 
Wolsey in his well-known lament did not give 
the complete picture, when lie said : 

This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth 
The tender leaves of hope ; to-morrow blossoms, 
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: 
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost. 

He should have portrayed a spring following 
such a winter. We may sleep in the dust of the 
earth, our leaf may have withered and may have 
been resolved into its constituent elements, but 
from this apparent deadness will come, under 
the right conditions, immortal life. A breath of 
the Lord will blow upon the valley of dry bones, 
and quickening energies will begin to pulsate, 
and the springtime of human existence will have 
come for all who have implanted in them the 
germ of eternal life. 

It will be a glad day When this mortal shall 
have put on immortality, when winter for human- 
ity shall have been succeeded by spring. In the 
leafing tree, and the blossoming vine, and the 



[25] 



The Easter Hope 



sweetly-scented air — in the reviving of nature 
each year we can see assurance of a spiritual 
process that speaks of a glorious immortality. 
He who wakes nature can wake humanity to life 
again, can wake the dead. He who clothes the 
grass of the field, will much more clothe " from 
heaven " those who derive from him their life. 
The verdure and the bloom and the fragrance 
given us yearly will have their counterparts in 
the living green and sweet fields of the celestial 
realm. 

We get a similar suggestion from " the time 
of the singing of birds." The birds have some- 
thing to say to us of the resurrection hope. The 
truth is imaged to us in the familiar story of 
the phoenix, that fabled bird of antiquity, which 
Herodotus said resembled the eagle, except that 
it was far more gorgeous and fed on nothing 
fleshly but on fragrant gums. Of large form and 
resplendent plumage, it flew from distant Arabia 
to the Egyptian city of the sun, where Joseph rose 
to greatness. There every five hundred years, 
according to the olden fairy tale, the magnificent 
creature built its nest of precious woods, and 
while spectators watched, it started about itself 
mysterious flames, which consumed it utterly. 
But out of the ashes rose a new phoenix of red 
and gold, and majestically sailed away in the 
direction whence that from which it sprang came, 
" accompanied," said Tacitus, " by a vast retinue 
of other birds gazing with admiration on the 

[26] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



beauteous miracle." This fiction at least repre- 
sents a truth. As the Latin exercises of our 
youth in our yEsop used to- say, " this fable 
teaches " that out of the dust into- which man 
is resolved at death rises an immortal spirit, that 
soars away toward the sky. The inspired Job 
himself is supposed by some to have drawn this 
lesson from the strange bird of which the ancients 
wrote so much. This is the patriarch's significant 
language as found in the margin of the Revised 
Version : 

Then I said, I shall die in my nest, 

And I shall multiply my days as the phcenix. 

If not really from their ashes, how from a prac- 
tical death the birds do come every spring ! They 
are dead to us during the long winter, but at its 
close what multitudes of them appear, and by 
their warbled songs they speak to us of a more 
genial clime than the wintry one of death. 

The Master inculcated a spirit of trust from 
the sparrows. In countless numbers they still are 
seen in the Holy Land, where they were so 
numerous in the time of Christ. They doubtless 
then as now twittered everywhere, being re- 
garded as much of a nuisance as English spar- 
rows are at present. In Palestine to-day they 
are so thick and tame that they get under the 
very feet of the pedestrian. If they are trampled 
to death, it makes no difference. They are 
crushed almost as so many worms. Anciently 



[27] 



The Easter Hope 



they were considered the most worthless of all 
birds, and five of them sold for two farthings. 
And yet, we are assured, not one of them fell to 
the ground without the Father's notice. God did 
not overlook the death of a sparrow. What un- 
numbered millions of people have crossed the 
stage of action! Sometimes it seems to us, as 
if, to use an expression of Henry Ward Beecher, 
they were swept into eternity like so many dead 
flies. At any rate, the numerous deaths in the 
human race seem to the skeptical mind as un- 
worthy of the divine attention as all the sparrows 
which each year are swept from the face of the 
earth. God, however, does note the fall of the 
very sparrows, of the least of birds, and each 
spring he brings them all again. We more liter- 
ally than they, more truly than the phoenix, shall 
rise out of the graves of winter, out of the ashes 
of death, at the springtime of the resurrection. 

So at last, when he appeareth, 
We from out our graves may spring, 

With our youth renewed like eagles, 
Flocking round our heavenly King. 

The instinctive longing which we have for a 
better clime, the aspiration which we have for 
heaven — this instinct for immortality was not 
planted in vain in the human breast. The in- 
stinct which prompts the birds at the coming of 
winter to spread their wings for a warmer climate 
makes it certain that the feathered songsters will 



[28] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



not go south, and will not come north in the 
spring, to be disappointed; the instinct is safe 
and unerring. Will God be kinder to- birds than 
to human beings? He cares much more for us 
than for the fowls of the air. If he has some- 
thing to answer to the migratory instinct of the 
birds, we may be sure that our expectation of a 
better country, of a fair summerland, will not 
meet with disappointment. The spirit that rises 
in Christian faith from the ashes of human mor- 
tality and soars away toward the sky, is going to 
find the blessedness anticipated. This should be 
our assurance, as we listen to the singing of birds, 
to the voice of the turtle-dove, to the joyous notes 
of bluebird and robin and the various songsters 
of the spring. 

How unbelieving some are is indicated by Jere- 
miah, when he says : " The stork in the heavens 
knoweth her appointed times ; and the turtle-dove 
and the swallow and the crane observe the time 
of their coming; but my people know not the 
law of Jehovah.' ' Take only one of these here 
named, the first. At Strassburg more interesting 
perhaps than the wonderful astronomical clock 
there, with its moving figures of the apostles and 
with its crowing cock to remind of Peter's denial 
of the Lord, is the stork, which is as sacred 
to that German city as the pigeons of St. Mark's 
are to Venice. The bird can be seen sitting 
statuesque on more than one chimney. " The 
winter finds her," says one writer, " far away 

[29] 



The Easter Hope 



among the highlands of Ethiopia. When the 
appointed day comes, as if moved by a divine in- 
spiration she spreads her wings for her long flight. 
A thousand miles down the valley of the Nile, a 
thousand more across the whole breadth of the 
Mediterranean Sea, and on still over Alps and 
Apennines, over sunny vineyards and snowy 
mountains to Holland and Denmark, and over the 
Baltic to Sweden and Norway, the stork pursues 
her aerial journey till she finds the same old tower 
and rebuilds the nest of the former year. And 
the bird," continues my informant, " would 
sooner die than shorten the journey or fail to 
start at the appointed time. No matter what 
storms may darken the air, or what sunny climes 
may invite her to rest on the way, she goes, 
guided by a mysterious and divine instinct, 
straight to her old home, and never rests till 
there." 

There is in this vivid picture a beautiful lesson 
of how the soul, divinely guided, returns to God 
whence it came. Let it but follow the directions 
of the still small voice heard within, and it will 
never falter or stop in its flight upward, till it rests 
in the bosom of God, till it finds its nest beyond 
the stars, in that "home of the soul." Beings 
with the migratory instinct for heaven are not 
going to be put to shame at the last. Cicero 
well said, " The consent of all is the voice of 
nature, and since all men everywhere agree in 
believing that there is something within us which 

[30] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



survives the grave, we must accept it as the 
truth." Addison was right in representing Cato 
sitting thoughtfully with Plato on immortality in 
hand, and musing thus : 

It must be so, — Plato, thou reasonest well! 
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
This longing after immortality? 

We, therefore, can appreciate William Cullen 
Bryant's " Ode to a Waterfowl " : 

Thou art gone, the abyss of heaven 

Hath swallowed up thy form, but on my heart 

Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, 
And shall not soon depart. 

He who, from zone to zone, 

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone, 

Will lead my steps aright. 

Preeminently does the spring testify that " the 
flowers appear on the earth." These speak of 
springing beauty. They might all be character- 
ized as immortelles, for they are ever rising from 
the dead. Take particularly a familiar but un- 
sightly bulb, that looks as much like an onion as 
anything, and we put it in the ground, or into a 
pot of rich soil, and it rises out of its earthen 
bed, develops a green stalk, and flowers into a 
pure white lily, which does service at Easter 
decorations, where blossoms seem to vie with one 
another in honor of the happy anniversary. This 

[313 



The Easter Hope 



is an image of how the mortal may blossom out 
into the immortal. Or consider what is some- 
times supposed to sip the sweetness oi the flowers, 
the lovely butterfly, and from what did it come ? 
From an ugly-looking caterpillar, or wormlike 
larva, crawling here and there. It sheds its skin 
and becomes a chrysalis, a seemingly dead little 
bundle of material done up in a kind of case. We 
can toss it up into the air, and catch it in our 
hand again, as if it were a bit of stick, and 
nothing could seem more utterly lifeless. But by 
successive stages from that lump of inert matter 
comes a gauzy creature with exquisitely tinted 
wings, a thing of beauty, which soars in the 
air, basks in the sunshine, alights on the flowers, 
and floats hither and thither to charm every be- 
holder. With these wonders in the flowery king- 
dom, it need not be thought incredible that God 
should raise the human dead. 

The flowers invite to faith with reference to 
the life immortal. Mungo Park, the Scottish 
traveler, was once robbed in Africa and left 
to die in the wilderness. Despoiled of every- 
thing, abandoned for dead five hundred miles 
from a European settlement, he was about to 
yield to what seemed to be his fate, a lonely 
death in the desert, when he noticed a delicate 
little flower blooming by his side. Thereupon he 
said to himself, " Can that Being who planted, 
watered, and brought to perfection this small 
flower in Vhis obs^re part of the world, look with 



[32] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



unconcern upon the condition and sufferings of 
one made in his own image?" With such in- 
spiration from what did not " waste its sweetness 
on the desert air," he struggled back to life and 
civilization once more. No more will that Being 
let any such highly endowed creation of his sink 
forever into the dust, to rise no more. We are 
taught better than that by the very lilies of the 
field springing each season from the black ground. 
Both the flowers and the butterflies that light 
thereon speak of wondrous transformations that 
are possible for humanity. Corresponding to the 
butterfly for us was the scarabaeus for the ancient 
Egyptians. When in 1905 it was my privilege to 
be in the land of the Nile, as with every visitor 
there it was my desire to secure some souvenir 
of the country of the Pharaohs. The most char- 
acteristic thing that can be carried away is a 
scarab, and the one purchased by me was pro- 
nounced genuine by experts both in the Cairo and 
British Museums. It bears the cartouche of 
Thotmes the Third, who reigned thirty-five hun- 
dred years ago, who was noted as the great ob- 
elisk-maker, who set up in Heliopolis that particu- 
lar obelisk now standing in Central Park of New 
York City. Why is a scarab of his worn proudly 
by me on my watch-chain above my Phi Beta 
Kappa key? Because it speaks of immortality. 
The Egyptian scarabaeus was a beetle, which de- 
posited its eggs in a ball of stable refuse, whose 
fermentation produced the necessary warmth for 



[33] 



The Easter Hope 



hatching. When the ancients saw life in due time 
coming from a seemingly dead pinch or globule 
of earthly matter, they naturally took the scara- 
baeus as an emblem of immortality, as we do the 
butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, and scarabs 
of clay and of precious stones, often inscribed 
with the name of the owner who thus could use 
his ornament as a seal, were manufactured in 
great numbers, and may have served for the visit- 
ing cards of antiquity. Such an antique is mine, 
and it speaks not only of the three and a half 
millenniums, which have elapsed since it was 
made, but of the countless ages that are to come 
in that eternity, of which Christians are to be 
the happy denizens. 

The Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock, D. D., whose un- 
timely taking off while abroad was so pathetic, 
has left this witness as to his deathless hope from 
what he had discerned in nature: 

O little bulb, uncouth, 

Ragged and rusty brown, 
Have you some dew of youth? 
Have you a crimson gown? 
Plant me and see 
What I shall be— 
God's fine surprise 
Before your eyes ! 

O fuzzy ugliness, 

Poor, helpless crawling worm, 
Can any loveliness 

Be in that sluggish form? 



[34] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



Hide me and see 
What I shall be— 
God's bright surprise 
Before your eyes ! 

O body wearing out, 

A crumbling house of clay! 
O agony of doubt 
And darkness and dismay! 
Trust God and see 
What I shall be— 
His best surprise 
Before your eyes ! 

Do we have arguments in these various sug- 
gestions from nature? No, but we do have that 
which is corroborative of what is otherwise es- 
tablished, fancy giving some confirmation to 
fact. We have all that was claimed at the be- 
ginning of the chapter, namely, "intimations of 
immortality," and with the poet who coined for 
us this expressive phrase we can repeat : 

To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 

The force of the present representation of the 
Easter truth has been felt in ancient and modern 
times alike, by both a Cicero and an Emerson. 
When the celebrated orator lost by death his 
daughter Tullia in the full bloom of her young 
womanhood, he longed to see again the idol of 
his heart, and he retired to his Tusculum villa, 
and tried to reassure himself in the faith that 

[35] 



The Easter Hope 



there would be a happy reunion in the hereafter, 
and this was the classic statement of his hope: 
" Man's grand ideals are overtures of immortal- 
ity, because they require and demand immortality 
for their realization.' ' The Concord philosopher 
similarly said: "Instincts and automatic forces 
in man are God's books of directions. Aspira- 
tions are liens upon immortal life, and they are 
stepping-stones, that slope through the darkness 
up to God. The planting of a desire indicates 
that the gratification of that desire is in the con- 
stitution of the creature that feels it. It is there 
structurally. The Creator keeps his word with 
everything and everybody." 

The historian Prescott, writing in 1843 to 
Charles Sumner, on the death of a lovely daugh- 
ter of the latter, said in harmony with the idea 
herein being set forth : " If any argument were 
needed, the existence and extinction here of such 
a being would of itself be enough to establish the 
immortality of the soul. It would seem as rea- 
sonable to suppose, that the blossom, with its 
curious organization and its tendencies to a fuller 
development, should be designated to perish in 
this immature state, as that such a soul, with the 
germ of such celestial existence within it, should 
not be destined for a further and more noble ex- 
pansion." 

William Jennings Bryan has been no less 
felicitous in giving expression to this thought 
in the following fashion : " If the Father deigns to 



[36] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



touch with divine power the cold and pulseless 
heart of the buried acorn and to make it burst 
forth from its prison walls, will he leave neglected 
in the earth the soul of man, made in the image 
of his Creator? If he stoops to give to the rose- 
bush, whose withered blossoms float upon the 
autumn breeze, the sweet assurance of another 
springtime, will he refuse the words of hope to 
the sons of men, when the frosts of winter come ? 
If matter mute and inanimate, though changed 
by the forces of nature into a multitude of forms, 
can never die, will the spirit of man suffer anni- 
hilation when it has paid a brief visit like a royal 
guest to this tenement of clay ? " 

Speaking of inanimate nature, and its persis- 
tence, we all must have been struck time and again 
with the long continuance of some trees. Thom- 
son in his " Land and the Book " speaks of cedars 
of Lebanon, which " have been growing ever since 
the Flood." These monarchs of the forest are 
like the mammoth trees of California, like those 
which have been seen by me near Santa Cruz, or 
like those at Mariposa in the approach to the 
Yosemite Valley. When we reflect how many 
generations of men have passed, since these rooted 
themselves in the soil, it is then that the irony 
of our brief earthly existence appears. An En- 
glish oak will stand for seven centuries or more, 
as against the fleeting three or five or seven 
decades of him created in the image of God. In 
the Giant Forest of the Pacific slope is many a 

[37] 



The Easter Hope 



sequoia, which has been lifting its green branches 
into the air anywhere from five to eight thousand 
years, for a longer time than the historic period of 
the whole race. Must we be shorter-lived than 
the insensible tree? Nay, through the immor- 
tality derived from him who is the resurrection 
and the life, we shall be longer-lived than cedar of 
Lebanon, or oak of England, or redwood of 
California. A million years may roll away, and 
still, planted beside the river of God, our leaf shall 
" not wither." 

Nature, which we have been considering, in 
one way or another is always opening up vistas 
of hope for the longing spirit, as she does, for 
instance, at The Balsams in the upper White 
Mountains region. Never was there spot lovelier 
or fuller of suggestion. In the immediate fore- 
ground is the shimmering and dimpled surface 
of Lake Gloriette, fair as untroubled young child- 
hood. Just beyond is Dixville Notch with its 
sterner aspects that remind us of our maturer 
years. We feel that we must penetrate the narrow 
defile with its deep and shadowy and cool seclu- 
sions, with its sunlit and wooded 'heights, with 
its towering and frowning rocks. In softly hum- 
ming automobile we do explore it in order to see 
what lies beyond, and we find broad, open spaces, 
and green meadows and fruitful fields and all that 
is sweetly inviting. Equally alluring is life, when 
we get its true perspective, when we take in its 
mysterious heights and depths, and we are con- 

[38] 



The Resurrection in Nature 



fident that the future has for us ever richer 
disclosures. We can say with Tennyson, 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let 

us range, 
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves 

of change. 

In the vicissitudes and varied experiences of the 
present, there is always beckoning to us through 
the Notch, down which we are coursing, some- 
thing better and brighter in the sweet fields of liv- 
ing green that are promised, and in the splendor 
ineffable that lies thereon. With this beatific 
revelation that comes to us through a bit of 
natural scenery, we can further say with the 
Englist poet, 

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that 
would be. 



[39] 



m 

IMMORTALITY AND THE 
RESURRECTION 



IMMORTALITY AND THE 
RESURRECTION 



The search for immortality has been as per- 
sistent as the quest of the Holy Grail. There has 
been no difference in this respect between the 
Orient and the Occident, between ancient and 
modern times. At a comparatively recent date 
on our American continent we have the romance 
and the tragedy of Ponce de Leon, who came with 
Columbus on the latter's second voyage of dis- 
covery. He had often heard of the stories cur- 
rent regarding a fountain of youth, and if it could 
be found all who might drink of its wondrous 
waters would remain forever young, would be- 
come endued with immortality. From what some 
Indians said he thought the famous fountain 
might be in a land that lay to the north. He ac- 
cordingly sailed in that direction, and on March 
2 7> IS 1 ^* on Easter Sunday for that year, he first 
sighted coasts which had indeed been seen a few 
years earlier, but which did not till then receive 
their christening, being called Florida from the 
Spanish for Feast of Flowers, this being only an- 
other name for Easter. 

On the auspicious anniversary of the Lord's 
resurrection, it seemed likely that the land con- 

[43] 



The Easter Hope 



taining the long-sought fountain of youth had 
been found. At St. Augustine in the Easter 
State of summer flowers that are perpetual, there 
is a magnificent: hotel bearing the name of Ponce 
de Leon, but that is the only immortality that he 
secured. What he so eagerly sought did not 
materialize any more than does the once fancied 
pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. So far 
from drinking of waters that made him live for- 
ever, in that very land of flowers where he went 
eight years later to establish a colony, he was 
furiously attacked by Indians, and a flint arrow 
lodged in his thigh made him return to Cuba, 
where after excruciating pain he died from the 
wound received. Though he failed in his quest, 
others have been more successful, pursuing their 
search in the high domain of thought and fact. 
The question is, Where can we get the most light 
on immortality and the resurrection ? 

Benjamin Franklin had thirteen rules for the 
ordering of his life, and though he was a free- 
thinker the last one was this, " Imitate Jesus and 
Socrates/' To these two we are more indebted 
than to any others for our knowledge of the 
future. The one through Plato gives us all the 
information which the classic world could furnish, 
and the other, through Paul especially, transmits 
to us all that light with which Christendom is 
flooded. We are to sit for a little at the feet of 
the two most distinguished teachers who ever 
walked the streets of highly favored Athens. 

[44] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

Philosopher and apostle, as they taught in that 
city, are to be our guides- 
First, we will notice the parallel in the cir- 
cumstances of each, rendering the more impres- 
sive what they had to say. Socrates claimed to 
have the guidance of a divine monitor. The ac- 
cusation against him, as we learn from his 
Apology, was, " He does not believe in the gods 
of the state, and has other new divinities of his 
own." He made the best argument for immor- 
tality which has come down from antiquity, but 
he was condemned by the Athenians, who more 
than four hundred years afterward at the preach- 
ing of " Jesus and the resurrection " had the same 
charge to make, the same objection to raise against 
the setting forth "of strange gods." 

On this ground the philosopher of old received 
the death-sentence. His execution was deferred 
for a month, till the return of a ship, which an- 
nually made a voyage to a sacred shrine. His life 
was to be spared for that length of time, as sub- 
sequently Christ's was to be " till after the feast." 
In his imprisonment he daily had the companion- 
ship of beloved disciples, through one of whom 
he had the opportunity of escaping the very night 
before the end, but he did not avail himself of 
this chance. He had no fear of death, and was 
peacefully slumbering when his friend came to 
him before daylight with the proposed plan for a 
secret departure. He remained in the prison, and 
spent the last day of his life in talking to a few 

[45] 



The Easter Hope 



of his disciples, who were with him, about immor- 
tality. " As I am going to another place," he 
said, " I ought to be thinking of the nature of 
the pilgrimage which I am about to make. What 
can I do better in the interval between this and the 
setting of the sun? " We are reminded of Christ, 
the night before his death, discoursing to his dis- 
ciples about the house of many mansions. 

As the divine Master had a John to lean upon 
his bosom, so the philosopher in his little circle 
had a Phaedo, who bears this testimony : " I was 
close to him on his right hand, seated on a sort of 
stool, and he on a couch which was a good deal 
higher. Now he had a way of playing with my 
hair, and then he smoothed my head, and pressed 
the hair upon my neck, and said, To-morrow, 
Phaedo, I sppose that these fair locks of yours will 
be severed," that is, in mourning for the death of 
Socrates. Aa the disciple, who reclined on the 
breast of Jesus, wrote the Fourth Gospel which 
contains the marvelous discourse at the Last Sup- 
per, so it was Phaedo, with whose hair Socrates 
had affectionately toyed — it was he, of whom the 
request was made by an acquaintance, " I wish 
that you would tell me about his death. What did 
he say in his last hours ? " It was in response to 
this that the charming narrative was given, and 
Plato clothed it in the matchless language with 
which it was conveyed to the Athenians, and to 
all the generations since. 

In the same city of Athens Paul stood up, and 

[46] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

spoke of " Jesus and the resurrection," thus do- 
ing* for John what Plato did for Phaedo, acquaint- 
ing the Athenians with what they otherwise might 
have remained ignorant of; but they gave no 
more heed to " Jesus and the resurrection " than 
they did nearly five centuries before to Socrates 
and his doctrine of immortality. Subsequent 
ages, however, have been profoundly impressed 
by both, and especially in view of the touching 
circumstances under which they spoke. 

Socrates had scarcely finished his conversation 
about immortality, when there came the last scene 
in his life. He bade farewell to* his wife and 
children, who were completely overcome. Even 
the jailer, who came in to announce that his hour 
had come, burst into tears. The cup of poison 
was brought, which, says the narrator who was in 
the prison and witnessed all, he took " in the 
easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear 
or change of color or feature." Then " cheer- 
fully he drank off the poison." At the swallowing 
of the fatal draught, the friends could no longer 
control their emotions, the tears flowed freely. 
Phaedo covered his face and wept, and from one 
there was a passionate outburst of grief, which the 
dying man asked to have cease. He walked 
calmly about the cell till his limbs refused to 
carry him, and then he lay down. 

The executioner examined him from time to 
time, pressing his foot hard and asking him if he 
felt it, and the lower limbs, over which Socrates 

[47] 



The Easter Hope 



himself passed his hands, saying, " When the 
poison reaches the heart, that will be the end/' 
When the coldness had reached his groins, he 
looked up and asked Crito to pay a small debt 
which he owed, and which at the moment came to 
mind. " The debt shall be paid," said Crito, 
" is there anything else ? " There was no answer, 
but presently there was a convulsive movement, 
and immediately the eyes set, he was dead. 

How impressive the teaching of immortality 
by lips which were so soon to be closed in death ! 
Likewise He who told his sorrowing disciples not 
to be troubled, who asked the women not to weep 
for him, who affectionately commended his 
mother bathed in tears to the beloved disciple, and 
who died upon the cross — lie spoke of the 'heavenly 
mansions to which he was going, of a triumphant 
rising from the dead, and the resurrection ever 
since has had a most precious significance. 

The Athenians gave no credence, no acceptance, 
to the preacher of immortality, nor to the preacher 
of the resurrection. Of each they said contemp- 
tuously, " He seemeth to be a setter forth of 
strange gods." The proud city rejected both 
Socrates and Jesus, but we whose citizenship is 
in beaven are of a better mind. We thoroughly 
believe what the classic philosopher obscurely 
taught, and what the Son of God clearly demon- 
strated, and what the apostle preached, and the 
result is a glad Easter each year. Immortality 
was brought to light in the resurrection, and these 

[48] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

were taught by the two greatest moral instructors 
to whom the world has listened, and under cir- 
cumstances which made what they said have all 
the weight of dying testimony, when the soul 
has its clearest vision, and seems to catch glimpses 
of the hereafter from the Delectable Mountains 
of the fair Beulah land overlooking the celestial 
Canaan. We read most truly in Richard the 
Second 

The tongues of dying men 

Enforce attention, like deep harmony: 

When words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain; 

For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. 

We turn next to the teachings themselves, as 
they appear aside from the accompanying circum- 
stances, and in their own strength. Now Socrates 
was not altogether certain as to what the future 
might bring forth. In his address to his judges, 
he hoped that he was going to join Orpheus, and 
Homer, and Ajax, and other deceased worthies. 
"What infinite delight would there be in con- 
versing with them and asking them questions! " 
was his enraptured exclamation. But he was 
not absolutely sure that such was to be his happy 
destiny. He did not know but that death might 
be a dreamless sleep through an eternal night, 
and he thought that would be a " gain." He, 
however, was not positive that so much blessed- 
ness as that was to' be his, for he closed his cele- 
brated Apology with these words : " The hour 
of my departure has arrived, and we go our ways, 

[49] 



The Easter Hope 



I to die, and you to live. Which is better God 
only knows/' 

His brain was racked by the awful uncertainty, 
which has since led a Hamlet to soliloquize : 

To be, or not to be: that is the question: 

by a sleep, to say we end 
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die : to sleep ; 
To sleep : perchance to dream : ay, there's the rub ; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause: 

And make us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of. 

All of us have more or less of this feeling; 
Socrates had it, although toward the last he grew 
more confident of his immortality. Still in his 
great argument therefor on the last day of his 
life, he acknowledged that he was trying to con- 
vince himself primarily, and others secondarily. 

What is the gist of the splendid argument 
which he used? He had substantially the same 
classes to meet that Paul had to encounter in the 
Epicureans and Stoics. Those schools were not 
as yet known by these names, but they existed in 
the germ, as they still continue to exist in the 
completed systems of materialism and pantheism. 

[50] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

Both these deny, as they always have denied, a 
personal future existence, maintaining that indi- 
viduals at death are resolved back into that gen- 
eral substance from which they sprang, as drops 
of rain lose their identity in the ocean from which 
they originally came. There is no personal God, 
much less is there any human personality, and we 
are merged at our dissolution into our native ele- 
ment of unconscious being. It is claimed that what 
is called the soul has a physical basis, and when 
the body perishes, it also does. 

This was the difficulty which Socrates had to 
meet and overcome satisfactorily, the incredulous 
of his day saying of the spirit, " immediately on 
the release from the body issuing forth like smoke 
or air and vanishing away into- nothingness." 
The most striking illustration of the ancient skep- 
tics was this: The soul seems superior to and 
independent of the body, but is it not analogous 
to a harmony and the lyre producing the same? 
Since music is so much finer than the instrument, 
it would be very natural to suppose that the former 
must survive the latter. Surely that which so 
charms all cannot perish, when the mere strings 
to which it is mechanically related are broken. 
After this manner, say materialists and pantheists, 
Epicureans and Stoics, do Socratic minds argue, 
that the superb soul must survive the body when 
the silver cords of physical life are loosed. That 
seems plausible, but, it is insisted, no one imagines 
that the harmony continues somewhere in the uni- 

[so 



The Easter Hope 



verse after the lyre has been destroyed; neither 
can the soul continue after the body has been 
unstrung by death. As surely as the music has 
forever flown when the instrument is destroyed, 
so has the soul when the body perishes. 

That was the forcible figure which carried con- 
sternation to the disciples of Socrates, and ap- 
parently to himself for a while. We too see the 
force of the illustration. The soul does seem to 
vanish with the dissolving of the body, even as 
the music does with the destruction of the instru- 
ment, notwithstanding the apparent superiority of 
the harmony to the lyre, and of the spiritual to 
the material, or of mind to matter. 

But Socrates was not vanquished; he led his 
forces to the field of argument again, as a general 
rallies, we are told, his defeated and broken army. 
In other words, he declared and showed that the 
cases were not analogous, though they might 
seem to be. A harmony, he maintained, is solely 
the production of the strings of the lyre, it has 
no power over them so as to resist them in the 
least. But the soul does have control of the affec- 
tions of the body ; it can say to thirst, Thou shalt 
not drink; and to desire, Thou shalt not be grati- 
fied. To set forth the difference in Socratic lan- 
guage, " a harmony can never utter a note at 
variance with the tensions and relaxations and 
vibrations and other affections of the strings out 
of which she is composed; she can only follow, 
she cannot lead them." That is true of a har- 



[52] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

mony, but, he says, we " discover the soul to 
be doing the exact opposite — leading the elements 
of which she is believed to be composed ; almost 
always opposing and coercing them in all sorts 
of ways throughout life." Well does the philoso- 
pher sum up by saying, that the soul is " a far 
diviner thing than any harmony." That is, he 
conclusively proves that the cases are not anal- 
ogous, of the soul perishing with the body as 
music does with the instrument. 

After all, the argument of Socrates, grand as 
it is for a pagan without the light of revelation, 
is negative. He shows how the soul is not likely 
to perish in the way supposed by his opponents, by 
Epicureans and Stoics, by materialists and pan- 
theists, but he does not demonstrate how the soul 
certainly is to exist after death. He has to con- 
fess that, in view of his own nearness to eternity, 
he is trying the best he can to fortify his own long- 
ings. He did not convince the Athenians, who 
saw in him only a promulgator of an improbable 
theory. Unanswerable, however, was the argu- 
ment of the apostle, when he preached " Jesus and 
the resurrection." As he did to* the Corinthians, 
he must have brought forward the solid array of 
facts furnished by the witnesses of the Lord 
having actually risen from the dead. Ever since, 
we have been moving on firm ground, since in the 
first century there were so many who spake that 
whereof they knew : " that which we have heard, 
that which we have seen with our eyes, that which 

[53] 



The Easter Hope 



we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the 
Word of Life." 

Ours can be the faith of Tennyson in 'his " In 
Memoriam " : 

Thou wilt not leave me in the dust ; 

Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 

He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And thou hast made him: thou art just. 

All must feel the force of what Dr. George A. 
Gordon has said : " The Christian idea of the 
future life is not happily expressed by the phrase, 
immortality of the soul. Soul stands for the seat 
of thought, feeling, activity ; body for the instru- 
ment of manifestation, the passive principle in the 
service of the active. This is the complete life 
here, and the Christian idea is that the complete 
life there will be analogous. Thought, and feel- 
ing, and activity will have in the future a mode 
of manifestation, a form of being, an instrument 
of service, like that which they have in this 
world." 

With the prospect of an undoubted resurrec- 
tion to follow death, we can celebrate Easter 
with gladness. Socrates himself, with his uncer- 
tain immortality, drew near the end with re- 
joicing. Will you not allow me, he asks ex- 
ultingly, to have the spirit of swans? "For 
they," he says, " when they perceive that they 
must die, having sung all their life long, do 
then sing more than ever, rejoicing in the 

[54] 



Immortality and the Resurrection 

thought that they are about to go away." And 
he insists that the song is not a " lament," since, 
he adds, " no bird sings when cold, or hungry, or 
in pain, not even the nightingale." 

He would not have approved of this sentiment 
by Tennyson: 

With an inner voice the river ran, 
Adown it floated a dying swan, 
And loudly did lament. 

He would have felt that the English poet struck 
the true key, when he wrote of the bird farther 
down the stream : 

But anon her awful jubilant voice, 
With a music strange and manifold, 
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold; 



And the silvery marish-flowers that throng 
The desolate creeks and pools among, 
Were flooded over with eddying song. 

Thus did Socrates with his belief in immortality 
claim to be floating down the current of life to- 
ward death, and we, holding to a more glorious 
resurrection, can with greater joy fulness ap- 
proach the end. Byron was only giving poetic 
expression to the Scripture, 

Let me die the death of the righteous, 
And let my last end be like his, 

when he said, " swanlike, let me sing and die." 
When one is being rapidly borne down the 

[553 



The Easter Hope 



stream toward eternity, he can think of the resur- 
rection, and go singing along, and his hymn of 
life will attain its most jubilant pitch at death, 
and this is his swan's song: 

My life flows on in endless song; 

Above earth's lamentation, 
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn 

That hails a new creation. 

Through all the tumult and the strife, 

I hear the music ringing; 
It finds an echo in my soul — 

How can I keep from singing? 

What though my joys and comforts die? 

The Lord my Saviour liveth; 
What though the darkness gather round? 

Songs in the night he giveth. 



[56] 



IV 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 



THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 



With the ancient heathen philosophers immor- 
tality was something shadowy. Disembodied 
spirits wandered ghostlike amid the eternal 
shades. Beyond this abstract idea as to the 
future, the belief that man is to> live again with 
a body was more or less prevalent, especially 
among the Hebrews. Paul taught that we are 
not to be specters in the universe, but that our 
mortal bodies are to be quickened. 

Nor is this belief unscientific. Sir Oliver 
Lodge, among the foremost in the realm of 
science, has expressed himself in this fashion: 
" Christianity both by its doctrines and its cere- 
monies rightly emphasizes the material aspect of 
existence. For it is founded upon the idea of 
incarnation ; and its belief in some sort of bodily 
resurrection is based on the idea that every real 
personal existence must have a double aspect — 
not spiritual alone, nor physical alone, but in 
some way both. Such an opinion, in a refined 
form, is common to many systems of philosophy, 
and is by no means out of harmony with science. 
Christianity, therefore, reasonably supplements 
the mere survival of a discarnate spirit, a home- 
less wanderer or melancholy ghost, with the warm 

[59] 



The Easter Hope 



and comfortable clothing of something that may 
legitimately be spoken of as a body." 

Is the present body to be raised ? Many would 
immediately answer in the negative. They 
openly dissent from that article in the Apostles' 
Creed expressing a belief " in the resurrection 
of the body." While we cannot be dogmatic 
here, the general trend of Scripture would seem 
to force assent to that, at least for substance of 
doctrine. The Pauline and biblical representa- 
tion would seem to be that burial is not the last 
of what is committed to the ground. The ques- 
tion is, Need faith stagger at a bodily resurrec- 
tion in some real though not strictly literalistic 
sense? Franklin's epitaph, written by himself, 
says: "The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, 
. . lies here food for worms; yet the work itself 
shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) ap- 
pear once more in a new and more beautiful edi- 
tion, corrected and amended by the author." We 
shall endeavor to see how the Christian hope as 
cherished for ages on this point may not be in 
its essential features unreasonable. 

We have to meet at the very outset that un- 
equivocal declaration of the Lord himself, " All 
that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and 
shall come forth." Just to what extent there is 
to be a recovery from bodily dissolution, we may 
not be able to say, but certain analogies would 
seem to justify a large faith. Dr. David Gregg 
has used this illustration (which, of course, must 



[60] 



The Resurrection of the Body- 
not be pressed too far) from the workshop of 
a celebrated scientist : " One day when Faraday 
was out, a workman accidentally knocked into 
a jar of acid a silver cup. It disappeared and 
was eaten up by the acid, and could not be found. 
The acid held it in solution. The workman was 
in great distress and perplexity. It was an utter 
mystery to him where the cup had gone. So far 
as his knowledge went, it had gone out of exis- 
tence forever. When the great chemist came in 
and heard the story, he threw some chemicals 
into the jar, and in a moment every particle of 
silver was precipitated to the bottom. He then 
lifted out the silver nugget and sent it to the smith, 
where it was recast into a beautiful cup. If a 
finite chemist," continues my informant, " can 
handle the particles of a silver cup in this way, 
what cannot the infinite Chemist do with the 
particles of a human body, when dissolved in 
the great jar of the universe? He can handle 
the universe as easily as Faraday can handle 
an acid jar, and can control it at will. What- 
ever the particles of the resurrected body may be, 
Paul says it is going to be changed so as to 
become a spiritual body." It will be recast like 
the silver of the cup. 

The chief of the apostles says that the Lord 
" shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, 
that it may be conformed to the body of his 
glory." That which is laid away in the grave 
is not to be wholly and irrevocably lost in nature, 

[61] 



The Easter Hope 



but cut of the state of humiliation is to spring 
the glorified body, just as (such is the apostle's 
illustration) the beautiful wheat grows from the 
decomposed seed. Out of the old will come the 
new on the principle of like producing like. Each 
seed, we are taught, has a " body of its own." 
The wheat blade does not come from deposited 
rye or barley or any seed except its own. Nor 
will the resurrection body form out of any other 
material whatever, it will in every case rise out of 
one's own dust. " It is sown in corruption, it 
is raised in incorruption." 

When, then, the saints are raised, they are to 
have their own proper bodies. If they should be 
formed anew, out and out, if they should have 
altogether different bodies, how could friends 
recognize one another in heaven? That there 
will be mutual recognition in the better country 
is not only felt by all, but it is implied in Holy 
Writ. The Saviour suggests the blessedness 
of sitting down with Abraham and Isaac and 
Jacob in the upper kingdom, and David antici- 
pated a glad reunion with a loved child taken 
away by death : " I shall go to him, but he shall 
not return to me." So that we shall know our 
friends and dear ones. But how can this be 
except from the old familiar looks? And what 
more natural than to suppose that the former 
appearance will be retained, because the new has 
originated in the old ? Up there every one is to 
have his " own body." 



[62] 



The Resurrection of the Body 

But that cannot be, it is objected, for the 
present material form crumbles to dust, passes 
into gases, and becomes a part of nature. That 
makes no difference, for the seed does the same, 
and its decay is even necessary to life. " That 
which thou thyself so west," says the inspired 
record, " is not quickened, except it die." The 
way in which grain germinates would seem im- 
possible, if we were not familiar with the phe- 
nomenon. See how strange the process is! A 
plain, little kernel is covered with earth, and in 
its hidden receptacle it dies, but up from its dust 
shoots a nice green blade, which develops into 
a strong stalk whose head bends with the weight 
of solid grain. The Lord himself saw in this a 
type of the resurrection, as he said, " Except a 
grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it 
abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth 
much fruit." Is not this just as incredible as the 
rising of life out of human dust? 

But human dust, it is said, is scattered far 
and wide. There will occur to the mind the case 
of Wyclif, how his body after a burial of forty- 
four years was disinterred and burned, while the 
ashes were flung into the Swift, the stream flow- 
ing through Lutterworth. Then, says Thomas 
Fuller the old historian, " this brook did con- 
vey his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, 
Severn into the narrow sea, and this into the 
wide ocean." The dust thus distributed round 
the globe would seem impossible of recovery for 

[6 3 ] 



The Easter Hope 



any resurrection body. This may be true, but 
worth noting is the fact that our present physical 
organism is composed of elements gathered from 
everywhere. We have served on our tables for 
the purpose the blueberries of Maine, the apples 
of Oregon, the grapefruit of Florida, and the 
raisins and prunes of California. We extend the 
range, as we get our nuts from Brazil in South 
America, our coffee from the island of Java, our 
spices from Ceylon, our oranges from Jaffa in 
Palestine, our figs from Smyrna in Asia Minor, 
our " Turkish delight " from Constantinople, our 
honey from Hymettus in Greece, our rice from 
China, and our tea from Japan. From such 
diversified sources are the component parts of 
the present body assembled. For the more glori- 
ous body of the future it would seem as if the 
Omnipotent and the Omniscient might be able 
to do what modern commerce so easily accom- 
plishes for us now. The incredibility of it all, 
however, may still further appear in that the 
human particles go to make up vegetation, tint- 
ing the flowers and enriching the grain and giv- 
ing freshness to the foliage. They may become 
parts of birds and beasts, and may even enter 
into the composition of other people. Thus two 
bodies dying at different times might conceivably 
have more or less of the same particles. There 
is here an obstacle to faitH in the manner of body 
Which we are to have? being precisely that which 
serves us at present. Nor is this absolute iden- 



[64] 



The Resurrection of the Body 

tity necessary to the conception of the kind of 
resurrection which we are maintaining. 

We are logically led from our first point, that 
the resurrection body will be substantially the 
same as the present, in that it will be an out- 
growth therefrom, to the second point, that while 
the same it yet will be very different. There will 
be the difference that exists between plant and 
seed. In nature, as the apostle says, " thou sow- 
est not the body that shall be, but a bare grain." 
Bare kernels become the waving, golden grain. 
There is quite a difference between a plain seed 
and the blossom which comes therefrom. Even 
so our bodies of humiliation are to- blossom into 
others of divine beauty. Out of the mortal will 
come the immortal, out of the material the im- 
material, out of the natural the spiritual. 

Is not such a resurrection, so great a change, 
equivalent to a new creation? No, it is still 
wheat which comes from the wheat seed. The 
new kernel is not created, but it grows from the 
old. The flower, too, comes from its own kind, 
the rose from a rose, the lily from a lily, the 
geranium from a geranium. In like manner the 
new body will rise from its own appropriate 
germ. It need not have the precise particles of 
the present organism. Atomically it may be 
wholly different. But that makes it another body, 
does it not? No, so long as it is an outgrowth 
from the old, it is substantially the same. 

Physiologists state that we do not have a 

[6 5 ] 



The Easter Hope 



single bodily element which we had a few years 
ago. The whole material frame changes in the 
course of a certain period, and yet we have not 
had a new body created. We are physically the 
same to all intents and purposes as before the 
bodily transformation. We have the same out- 
ward appearance, our acquaintances recognize us 
by the old looks. And yet we are totally differ- 
ent, not an atom of our former body remaining, 
it having passed into other forms of existence. 
Lotze compares the body, always changing yet 
ever the same, to " a ripple around a submerged 
stone." The watery atoms are in a constant flux, 
but the ripple forever remains; like Tennyson's 
brook, it " goes on forever," around that which 
gives it form. 

Then let one's dust be scattered, for it is not 
the material particles which constitute the same- 
ness. The body may even be blown to atoms by 
an exploding shell in time of war, but we readily 
see how it may have a worthy successor, with no 
absolute break in continuity, any more than there 
is in the seed that is dissolved in order to the new 
embodiment that follows and that yet is some- 
how mysteriously related to what was commit- 
ted to the ground. There can be a vital, mold- 
ing principle, which need not be lost. There 
seems to be in every body a germ, or something, 
which keeps it essentially the same amid the 
greatest changes. This germinant principle is 
not lost during sleep, and may it not be retained 

[66] 



The Resurrection of the Body 

during the sleep of death? It operates in the 
daily changes which this mortal flesh is undergo- 
ing, and may it not be operative during the last 
great change? We know that this body which 
we now have soon will be no more, but we cher- 
ish it though it does pass away, for there is in it 
a hidden something which forms a new body. 

We, therefore, lay away our dear ones with 
hope. Those remains of themselves may be 
worthless, but they are precious for what they 
are somehow to bring forth, and hence we lov- 
ingly visit the graves of our departed. We never 
want to disassociate entirely the buried body from 
the personality which is to be. Tertullian, re- 
moved only a century from the apostolic age, 
expressed a treasured truth, when he spoke of a 
ship-owner having a vessel, which has done long 
service amid tempest and wind, fitted up anew, 
to float henceforth for his pleasure, though no 
longer put to the former hard use. He has her 
repaired, reconstructed throughout, and retired 
with honor. The old Latin and Christian writer 
fondly pictures the ship, " after being shattered 
with the storm and broken by decay," thoroughly 
" restored, gallantly riding on the wave in all the 
beauty of a renewed fabric! " 

We are reminded of the popular indignation 
against the dismantling of the United States 
frigate Constitution. Built at Boston in 1797, 
when the War of 1812 came, she led a British 
fleet of five ships a great chase, and she after- 

[67] 



The Easter Hope 



ward engaged one of them separately, captured 
her and burned her to the water's edge. Subse- 
quently she compelled another frigate of the foe 
to surrender, and still later she fought with equal 
success two other warships. With such feats 
of seamanship rarely if ever surpassed, it did 
seem a shame when in 1830 the secretary of the 
navy proposed to break her up and sell her for 
scraps of metal. Naturally the entire nation 
flamed up in patriotic protest, which found 
expression in the appeal of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes for "Old Ironsides." The poet burned 
with righteous wrath, when it was intended that 

The harpies of the shore shall pluck 
The eagle of the sea! 

His ringing lines still stir our blood : 

O better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave; 
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 

And there should be her grave; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every threadbare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms, 

The lightning and the gale! 

Of course, that secured her preservation, and 
the whole country applauded. When again in 
President Roosevelt's administration, another 
secretary of the navy suggested the making of 
her a target, and thus ending her existence, a 

[68] 



The Resurrection of the Body 

storm of public opposition saved her a second 
time, and she still floats at the dock in Charles- 
town, as Nelson's flagship, The Victory, still 
rides the water at Portsmouth, England. We 
can even imagine our " fighting frigate " by oft 
repairs losing time and again beam and timber 
and iron, till perhaps nothing of her original self 
remained, but she would still be " Old Ironsides/' 
she would preserve her identity, though the final 
change in her might be total. Let her be repaired 
whenever necessary, and let her as reconstructed 
be ever tenderly cherished, for this accords with 
the eternal fitness of things. 

Now the craft of the human body has borne 
the militant spirit too long on life's tempestuous 
ocean, the former has served the latter too well, 
to be utterly dismantled and cast out as " rubbish 
to the void." Let there be a restoration which 
shall make the future for it as glorious as splen- 
did service in the past would seem to justify. 
Let there be suitable triumph in the everlasting 
survival of the bodily mechanism, which is so 
much more wonderful than anything ever put to- 
gether by the mechanical genius of human skill. 
Let there be a triumphant rising- from the dead, 
for nothing else can satisfy our idea of the vic- 
tory that there should be, and that there is to be. 

The great stumbling-block to a resurrection 
like that for which we are pleading is removed, 
when we are assured by the inspired Paul, that 
this precise body, atom for atom, is not to rise. 

[69 j 



The Easter Hope 



If absolute identity is to be insisted upon, one 
might properly inquire Which exact body is to be 
raised, that which we had at twenty years of 
age, or at twenty-seven, or at thirty-four, or 
which of the ten to fifteen bodies possible to a 
long life? But nothing of the sort is taught in 
the Bible. Origen, that early and acute Chris- 
tian Father, suggested approvingly, " every bod- 
ily substance will be so pure and refined as to 
be like ether, and of a celestial purity and clear- 
ness." He was practically correct, for, on the 
authority of the Epistle to the Corinthians, the 
heavenly body is to transcend the earthly, as one 
star surpasses another in glory, as a sun outshines 
an asteroid. There will be fitness to surroundings, 
the terrestrial for earth and the celestial for 
heaven, the natural for the present and the spir- 
itual for the future. 

We, however, shall have real bodies, and faces 
will light up in the same old way. There will 
be the indescribable air of the past, only more 
winsome; the former intonation of voice, except 
that there will be the accents of heaven ; the for- 
mer smile, but far more radiant. Personality 
will be retained, but imperfections will be elimi- 
nated. As God in the processes of nature 
changes the black charcoal or carbon into the 
flashing diamond, so will he change the human 
body into something more divinely fair. The 
cumbrous load of clay will be transfigured into a 
spiritual body, which can ascend through the air 



[703 



The Resurrection of the Body 

and toward the sky, as easily as did the Lord's 
own glorious and glorified body, which Raphael 
in his matchless painting makes to float so lightly 
in the atmosphere. "As we have borne the image 
of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of 
the heavenly." 

An article once in a Boston periodical by a 
president of the Los Angeles Astronomical Soci- 
ety contained an illuminating illustration in this 
connection. There was a shallow pool of water, 
in which multitudes of small insects were swim- 
ming round and round, enjoying their limited 
and ephemeral life all unconscious of its brevity 
and of anything more abiding. Every once in a 
while one of them seemed to emerge from among 
the rest, coming to the surface. It apparently 
had on its sides slight enlargements, which on 
being exposed for a little to the sunlight became 
wings, by which it mounted into the air, and had 
the larger freedom of the whole upper atmos- 
phere in a world of brightness and beauty, of 
fragrance and flowers. We can imagine its fel- 
lows, confined to the contracted and undesirable 
pool, sorrowing for its untimely taking off, not 
realizing that departure for it was far better, in 
that it had risen to a higher sphere, and was re- 
joicing in much more genial and attractive sur- 
roundings. Man in his seeming decease ascends 
from mortality to immortality, from the restricted 
pool to the expansive sky. He leaves his "muddy 
vestment of decay," and is mysteriously trans- 

[71] 



The Easter Hope 



formed into a being with wings, with superior 
endowments, to be henceforth in a far preferable 
environment He soars away to a larger liberty, 
and into a heaven of transcendent light and sur- 
passing splendor. The redeemed soul that is re- 
leased from the terrestrial, though mourned 
down here below, is basking in the sunshine of a 
far lovelier world than this earth, even of the 
promised "better country," infinitely better, in 
that it is fairest Paradise, the celestial Eden. 



[72] 



THE BEARING OF EVOLUTION ON 
THE RESURRECTION HOPE 



THE BEARING OF EVOLUTION ON 
THE RESURRECTION HOPE 



Advanced thinkers have considered the bear- 
ing of evolution on the resurrection hope. From 
the new view-point they have endeavored to an- 
swer Job's question of perennial interest, "If a 
man die, shall he live again?" 

First, with all the light that science has re- 
cently thrown upon the subject, Is man to live 
again in spirit? Relegating to the background 
for the present the body, Is the soul to survive ? 
Saying nothing for the time being about a resur- 
rection, Is immortality to be a fact ? On the dis- 
integration of the physical organism, the spirit 
seems to depart like a puff of air, like a vanish- 
ing breath, like smoke disappearing in the atmos- 
phere. Are not the bodily and the mental or 
spiritual inseparable? When the evolutionary 
idea first began to exercise its sway in human 
thought, the materialist could say very plausibly, 
"After the nervous system has been resolved into 
its elements, what reason have we to suppose that 
consciousness survives, any more than that the 
wetness of water should survive its separation 
into oxygen and hydrogen ? " Another way of 
stating this view is as follows : " Conscious men- 

[75] 



The Easter Hope 



tal phenomena are products of the organic tissues 
with which they are associated." 

Though the first superficial conclusions were 
more or less materialistic, a deeper view even of 
evolution has made for the reign of God, and for 
the emergence of the immortal from the mortal. 
When nature worked for ages and by slow proc- 
esses to produce the eye, it was certain that when 
sight was developed from sensitive matter, there 
would be something to look at. There would 
be meadow and forest, there would be lake 
and river, there would be sea and sky, there 
would be all that is beautiful and satisfying 
to the vision. When the ear was gradually de- 
veloped, when that wondrous piece of mechanism 
was evolved after whole millenniums, there was 
sure to be sound to answer to the slow creation. 
There would be the thunder of the cataract, there 
would be the music of the bird; there would be 
the blast and roar of the storm, and there would 
be the whisper of the zephyr; there would be the 
prima donna's trill, and there would be the sub- 
lime symphony; there would be the silvery notes 
of the piano, and the deep roll of the organ ; there 
would be all that is pleasing to the auricular 
nerves attuned by the hand of Jehovah through 
geologic ages. That is to say, God has some- 
thing to answer to every physical creation of his. 

Now he has endowed man not only with bod- 
ily functions, but also* with mental and spiritual 
aptitudes. If evolution be true, " the ascent of 

[76] 



The Bearing of Evolution on the Resurrection 

man " both intellectually and morally has been 
through bewildering cycles of time. Science has 
no more axiomatic truth than the persistence of 
force that is merely physical, and shall force of 
character alone perish? Knowledge, feeling, 
will; thought, affection, purpose; these surely 
have not been laboriously developed only to> be 
less enduring than the material. As another has 
pertinently asked, " Must atoms endure, While 
spirits decay? " 

Particularly does this apply to the distinctively 
religious faculties, that were the highest develop- 
ment of God's human creation. From our first 
acquaintance with primitive man he has had a 
belief in a hereafter, and this conviction has 
strengthened as he has advanced. The more 
highly he is developed, the more keenly does he 
feel that he could not have been brought to the 
culmination of his being only to be resolved into 
nothingness. There must be some answering 
reality to his instinct for immortality. John 
Fiske, the most brilliant evolutionist of America, 
worked " through nature to God/' and a fitting 
sequel to his " everlasing reality of religion " was 
his " Life Everlasting," published after his death, 
the crowning work of his numerous literary pro- 
ductions. He insisted that there must be some- 
thing to correspond to man's longing for a future 
life, or there would be a break in nature, for 
every other work of God — the eye, for instance, 
and the ear — does have an answering reality. 

[77] 



The Easter Hope 



Hence the force of what Newman Smyth says 
in his " Through Science to Faith," comprising 
his Lowell lectures : " What life begins to need, 
to feel from within that it must find, shall eventu- 
ally be supplied from without." 

If there is anything to the scientific " survival 
of the fittest," we can confidently expect the 
higher soul to survive the lower body. Other- 
wise God is not good, and there is nothing of 
Drummond's altruism in nature, such that he 
maintained that evolution when understood was 
a " genuine love story." Creation has indeed 
groaned and travailed in pain, as the apostle 
Paul said, but the final outcome of the struggle 
in the main has been beneficent. 

Not that there has always been progress in 
every detail, for there is sometimes a reversion 
to the original type, and there has even been the 
extinction of specific species, A perversion of 
being may equally result in individual deteriora- 
tion, and in a degeneration that finally involves 
the loss of a soul. But if there is harmony with 
God's laws, natural and spiritual, the movement 
of the whole is ever upward. Tennyson accord- 
ingly believed in immortality, to quote his own 
words, 

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed. 

Even before the trend of modern views was seen 
by most to be in accordance with the scriptural 

[78] 



The Bearing of Evolution on the Resurrection 

working together of all things for good, he could 
say that they 

Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 

Now the question is, Is the finished product to 
be all at once cast aside? Is man, God's best 
work, to be relegated to nothingness? Doctor 
Munger with his usual force has said, " Does he 
stand for a moment on the summit, exulting in 
his emergence from nature, only to fall back into 
the dust at its base?" In an eloquent passage 
Dr. George A. Gordon in summing up this argu- 
ment has said : " Man is nature's highest product, 
and he is a product of inconceivable cost. Toward 
him Nature has been looking forward from a 
past indefinitely remote. When she was con- 
cerned chiefly with the dance of atoms, with the 
play of the primitive fire-mist, she had the 
thought of him in her great heart ; when she was 
elaborating worlds, setting the solar order on 
high, forming this planet of ours and preparing 
it for life, man was still her darling idea, and 
in the vast procession of life from the barely to 
the highly organized, he was never for one mo- 
ment out of sight The evolution, running 
through countless ages, in innumerable forms, 
at a cost of energy and suffering inconceivably 
great, was all the while aspiring to manhood. 
The whole creation groaned and travailed in 
pain until the manifestation of the sons of God. 

[79] 



The Easter Hope 



Man is Nature's last and costliest work. The 
flower of being is intelligence and love. . . Can 
it be that this last and finest product of Nature, 
this result of intelligence and love aimed at from 
the beginning and reached at a cost immeasur- 
able, shall not be conserved in growing beauty 
and power forever? Physical evolution finds its 
goal in man, and the process that hereupon be- 
gins finds its end in the complete realization of 
his ethical and spiritual nature." Such is the 
magnificently put argument for the Christian 
hope. Unless the seeds of the second and only 
real death are introduced by sin into the consti- 
tution and heart, into the physical and moral 
nature, there seems to be no reason to doubt the 
ultimate realization of life eternal through Him 
who by his own resurrection brought immortality 
to light. 

But there is not only the truth of immortality, 
there is also that of the resurrection, to be viewed 
from the new standpoint. To the question, " If 
a man die, shall he live again?-" the evolution- 
ary answer is, Yes, not only in spirit, but also in 
body. There is a natural yearning to live again 
in the entirety of our being, physical as well as 
psychical. There is a universal shrinking from 
the ghost world of Homer. We all pity the 
blind bard's disembodied spirits, his spectral 
shadows. When Odysseus is made to visit 
Hades, and when he meets his mother and pro- 
ceeds to embrace her, she is so unsubstantial 



[80] 



The Bearing of Evolution on the Resurrection 

that he says, " Three times out of my arms like 
a shadow or dream she flitted, and the sharp 
pain about my heart grew only more." Like the 
English poet we long for " the touch of a van- 
ished hand." We want the future to be as real 
as the present. In order to do this, bodily condi- 
tions would seem to be essential, though with 
great changes in this respect possible and prob- 
able, even as now an evolution is continually 
going on. Bishop Butler, who* died in 1752, long 
before the full working of natural law was 
known, said most truly in his famous " Anal- 
ogy " : " We have already several times over lost 
a great part, or perhaps the whole of our body, 
according to certain common established laws 
of nature, yet we remain the same living agents ; 
when we shall lose as great a part, or the whole, 
by another common established law of nature, 
death, why may we not also remain the same? " 

It was likewise this philosophical writer, who 
dwelt with rapture on the difference between the 
eagle in the egg and the same king of birds soar- 
ing toward the sun. Why may there not be a 
similar emergence of the immortal from the mor- 
tal? We want to be more than classic shades, 
more than Shakespeare's " gibbering spirits," 
more than the uncanny specters of Homer's 
Hades. 

How does the evolutionary argument apply to 
the not improbable retention of what has been 
called " the human form divine " ? God has been 

[81] 



The Easter Hope 



working for measureless eons in developing our 
physical organism, until it is as nearly perfect as 
anything can be. It is marvelous in its construc- 
tion, " fearfully and wonderfully made," says 
the Psalmist, and it is amazingly fitted to its ends. 
Moreover, hand and eye and all the organs, 
through the hereditary as well as through years 
of practice, have been trained to a deftness and 
to a precision of use that would seem miraculous, 
were we not so familiar with the natural move- 
ments in which grace and strength commingle. 
The body is a no less finished product than the 
soul. From what remote beginnings has it, ac- 
cording to evolution, been in process of develop- 
ment, while it has been carried forward toward 
perfection by years of practical training. Is 
this finished physical product to be wholly and 
suddenly discarded because of the accident of 
death? 

Dr. Washington Gladden has well said that 
the "sculptor never tries to conceive of anything 
more shapely or more fair" than our "bodily 
organism," for whose continuance he argues. 
" It is much more reasonable to suppose," he 
says, " that we shall have in the other life bodily 
organisms with which our spirits will be familiar, 
to the uses of which they are accustomed, than 
that we shall be placed in tabernacles all new and 
strange." The same author very pertinently 
asks, " Is it reasonable to suppose that the Cre- 
ator would give us these tools to use, and keep us 

[82] 



The Bearing of Evolution on the Resurrection 

using them for a lifetime, and then when we 
have fairly gained the mastery of them would 
take them from us and set us to work with new 
ones?'' John Fiske, too, in his last book found 
it difficult to imagine our " psychical activity as 
continuing without the aid of the physical ma- 
chinery of sensation." We, therefore, on evo- 
lutionary grounds reach the same conclusion 
relative to the body as to the soul, that if a man 
die, he shall live again, and live most gloriously 
in the whole range of his being. There is to be 
a continuity of bodily no less than of spiritual 
existence. Form and feature as well as spirit and 
character are to be carried over from this into 
the next world. There has been no finer inter- 
preter of mysterious being than President 
Charles Cuthbert Hall, of the Union Theological 
Seminary in New York, and when he discusses 
" The Redeemed Life After Death," he mentions 
three essentials, namely, " the continuance of 
personal identity, the progress of the soul, the 
resurrection of the body." The last he calls 
Christianity's "most characteristic belief," and 
declares " that our instinctive protest against* the 
humiliation and wreckage of the body by death 
is a prophetic intimation of immortality." 

Dr. Newman Smyth is here in accord with 
these other up-to-date thinkers, for he has said: 
" We may reasonably conclude that if now some 
body, it may be as yet a rudimentary and imper- 
fect body, has become of inestimable service to 

[8 3 ] 



The Easter Hope 



mind in its happy communication with the out- 
ward world, and in the mutual recognition of 
friends; then some bodiliness will always be of 
service to mind; and after this brief earth-time 
the spirit in man may expect to receive the better 
thing prepared for it, and to enter into some 
future embodiment more finely organized for its 
motion and vision in the life beyond/' The con- 
clusion of the whole matter is that an instinct 
of human nature cherishes both the material and 
the spiritual elements that go to make up a loved 
personality, saying with Browning: 

But the soul is not the body, and the breath is not the flute ; 
Both together make the music: either marred, and all is 
mute. 



[8 4 ] 



VI 
A THREEFOLD RESURRECTION 



A THREEFOLD RESURRECTION 



We are to awake, says the Psalmist, in the 
divine likeness. We will endeavor to ascertain 
what that likeness is to be in the light of what 
Paul says. We used to think in this connection 
mainly of the body, whereas that is merely part 
of man. Of what does he consist? Of a soul 
also, we say. A further analysis claims to have 
discovered a third constituent in that mysterious 
combination we call a human being. Plato made 
a threefold division of man, and in this he has 
been followed by other philosophers, and appar- 
ently by Paul himself, who speaks of body, soul, 
and spirit. 

The majority of thinkers, however, identify 
the soul and the spirit, and they probably are cor- 
rect in maintaining that man consists simply of 
soul and body, or of spirit and body, or of mind 
and matter, according to the varying phraseol- 
ogy which may be used. The scientist too seems 
to admit only these two elements, the material 
and the immaterial. But popularly speaking, we 
can take the scriptural triad, and find that it cor- 
responds loosely at least to three great lines of 
thought. Human nature may be and very likely 
is dual ; but if after a fashion there be a trinity 

[8 7 ] 



The Easter Hope 



in individual unity, all the more shall we be in 
accord with the divine nature, which, according 
to the orthodox belief, is triune. God is Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit; he is creator, redeemer, 
and sanctifier, and man may be quite literally 
body, soul, and spirit. 

The body would thus be the physical organiza- 
tion, the soul would be what we more strictly 
call mind, and the spirit would be the distinc- 
tively religious element. We accordingly have 
three great branches of knowledge : science, meta- 
physics, and theology. We have material, men- 
tal, and moral phenomena to engage the atten- 
tion. So that we have a practical basis for 
speaking of a threefold resurrection. The ques- 
tion is, In what respect shall we rise again, 
bodily, intellectually, or spiritually? We are 
dealing with different departments of being. 
Body, mind, and soul constitute the famous 
" triangle" of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation in all its activities for human welfare, and 
rightly so, since here are ideals of boundless pos- 
sibilities in a future that speaks of ultimate per- 
fection. We are to awake in the likeness of the 
Saviour, but in what particular? 

First of all, as we have seen, there is to be in 
a sense a bodily resurrection, though there has 
been a tendency to ignore this truth, which once 
was prominent when the subject of man's future 
was considered. There has been a disposition 
to say that the bodily might better not be empha- 



[88] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



sized, and yet a great philosophical instructor, 
Mark Hopkins of Williams College fame, was 
accustomed to begin teaching along his special 
line with lectures on anatomy and physiology 
(for which his early medical training had pre- 
pared him), and then he advanced naturally and 
logically to the mental and moral life. In pur- 
suing such a course he was following Scripture, 
which pronounces the body to be a temple of the 
Holy Spirit, and which has for it an important 
place in the hereafter. 

To be sure, we read in the word, that " flesh 
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom," indicat- 
ing that we are to guard against any crude and 
literalistic ideas, such as were once entertained, 
so that the poet Young, in his " The Last Day," 
could say: 

Now charnels rattle; scattered limbs and all 
The various bones, obsequious to the call 
Self-moved advance ; the neck perhaps to meet 
The distant head; the distant head the feet, 
Dreadful to view, see through the dusky sky 
Fragments of bodies in confusion fly. 

Rejecting any such fanciful conceptions, we 
nevertheless are to remember that the Master 
himself speaks of " both soul and body " having 
a part in the world to come, while Paul refers 
to our anxious waiting for " the redemption of 
our body." We shall simply accept the fact of the 
power of Him who is the resurrection and the life, 



[89] 



The Easter Hope 



and who, we are assured, " shall fashion anew 
the body of our humiliation, that it may be con- 
formed to the body of his glory." 

Do we realize what this implies? Of Christ's 
bodily glory we get some conception, when we 
recall the transfiguration. What an effulgence 
burst forth, irradiating all his form! An Evan- 
gelist says, " His face did shine as the sun, and 
his garments became white as the light." When 
John, in the revelation with which he was fa- 
vored, saw him, he was overcome by the vision 
of supernal splendor, of the countenance dazzling 
as the orb of day, and of the very hand reflecting 
the light of seven stars. Shakespeare speaks of 
a face like that of Jove,, and of an eye like that 
of Mars: 

A combination and a form indeed, 
Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
To give the world assurance of a man. 

But diviner still than such a human form divine 
will be the body like unto Christ's. 

Who can even imagine the exquisite sensibili- 
ties, with which it will be endowed ? The things 
which God has prepared for those that love him 
are beyond our conception. Paul was " caught 
up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words." 
So transporting was his experience " in the third 
heaven," that he did not know whether he was 
" in the body, or apart from the body." It was 
beyond anything he had ever experienced on 

[90] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



earth. His sense of hearing had never before 
been so absolutely regaled — " unspeakable words." 
There may be more than we sometimes suppose 
to the promise that deaf ears shall be unstopped. 
At the center of the universe with God, we may 
yet to all intents and purposes listen to the 
" music of the spheres," of which the ancients 
wrote as they thought of revolving worlds set in 
crystal spheroids. 

The blind Milton may have been writing fact 
as well as poetry, when he said, 

That heavenly harmony, which none can hear 
Of human mould, with gross, unpurged ear. 

The great dramatist may not have been merely 
dreaming, when he said, 

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, 
But in his motion like an angel sings. 

We may yet hear practically all this, hearing cer- 
tainly more than we do now. There seems to 
be no limit to the development of facilities for 
hearing. We can make ourselves heard with the 
ordinary voice by means of the telephone at a 
distance of a thousand miles and more; we can, 
as it were, whisper from Boston to Chicago, and 
even to San Francisco, across whole States. How 
boundless are the possibilities of the sense of 
hearing in the glorified body, when God's entire 
universe may become a vast whispering gallery, 

[91] 



The Easter Hope 



wherein we can in an instant confer with a friend 
millions of miles away, wherein the inhabitant 
of the renewed earth possibly can whisper a 
secret to a kindred spirit on Mars or Venus ; with 
recent telephonic developments this does not seem 
incredible. If we with our imperfect knowledge 
can accomplish so much, what cannot the Om- 
niscient effect by the skilful manipulation of his 
own and to him well-known laws? 

So, too, the vision is capable of almost indefi- 
nite enlargement. By powerful telescopes we 
sweep the heavens, and thousands of stars before 
invisible delight the sight. Could our blind eyes 
be opened, we doubtless would see What the 
prophet's servant saw : " Behold, the mountain 
was full of horses and chariots of fire round 
about." Angelic hosts were seen in encircling 
lines of protection. What shall we not be able 
to see with the clarified vision of the glorified 
body, clarified to the extent of microscopic and 
telescopic perfection ! 

It is needless to speak of the other senses; of 
taste to be gratified with the twelve manner of 
fruits on the tree of life ; of smell which shall not 
be left unsatisfied by Him who created every 
flower of earth, from the rose of Sharon to the 
lily of the valley; of feeling which shall never 
again be compelled to utter Tennyson's pathetic 
cry, 

But O for the touch o£ a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still ! 



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A Threefold Resurrection 



None of the sensibilities shall any more be disap- 
pointed. We shall be satisfied when we awake 
in the likeness of the Son of God, when we attain 
unto the perfect stature of him in whom " dwell- 
eth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily/' 

We are not satisfied now with any of our 
senses. We are continually experimenting and 
inventing to make ourselves more easily heard, 
and the result is telephones and audiphones and 
acousticons. We are not content with our pow- 
ers of vision, and we are manufacturing tele- 
scopes of a longer and longer range, and micro- 
scopes of a more and more minute capacity. The 
connoisseur of the table searches the tropics for 
something new to please the palate, but not till 
we eat of the tree of life shall all our wants be 
supplied. The botanist is in constant quest of 
flowers which have hitherto wasted their sweet- 
ness on the desert air, but only the fragrant fields 
of Eden will entirely meet our desires and ex- 
pectations. The minister exhorts the mourner to 
patience in view of the clasping of hands by and 
by, but not till the departed one is actually in the 
embrace of love will anxious feeling rest. 

Oh the blessedness of having every bodily sense 
satisfied, senses, too, developed to the full; as 
Paul says, "our mortal bodies quickened," in 
sight, in hearing, in every respect, with the pos- 
sible addition of new and more exalted endow- 
ments to which we are strangers at present. Said 
so conservative a theologian as Dr. Charles 



[93] 



The Easter Hope 



Hodge of Princeton, " Instead of the slow and 
wearisome means of locomotion to which we are 
now confined, we may be able in the hereafter to 
pass with the velocity of light or of thought itself 
from one part of the universe to another.'' We 
can hardly limit the capabilities of a body like 
unto His, which could enter a room barred and 
bolted; which could and did ascend through the 
air into the blue sky until a fleecy cloud received 
it out of sight. 

We are, then, to be " clothed upon " with 
something tangible, that yet is not natural but 
spiritual, and if you please spirituelle. We are 
not to be disembodied spirits, pale ghosts, but we 
are to have a glorious and satisfactory embodi- 
ment of some sort, though we may not be able 
to say exactly what. The reality will transcend 
our most glowing conception. 

In the second place, we are to awake not only 
physically, but mentally. Our resurrection is to 
be in the intellectual likeness of God. " Now I 
know in part," says Paul, " but then shall I know 
even as also I have been known." How we crave 
more knowledge! A peculiarity of the mind is 
indicated by a remark which Abraham Lincoln 
once made : " I never was contented when I got 
an idea until I could bound it north, and bound 
it east, and bound it south, and bound it west." 
The intellect of man has been bounding things 
until our knowledge is marvelous. 

What colossal systems of philosophy, of the- 

[94] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



ology, of jurisprudence, have been wrought out 
with a grasp of mind truly astonishing! Then 
there has been evolved the world of poetry and 
of literature in general and of music and of art, 
through mental processes that have been superb. 

How strange that in the lifting of a lid of a 
teakettle by steam should have been discovered 
the power which drives engines across continents, 
and ships across oceans! How peculiar that in 
the electricity which a kite gathers high in the 
air should have been found the subtle force, by 
which messages can be flashed over the earth and 
under the sea, and by which we have our rapid 
transit in the electric cars running so swiftly 
hither and thither! How amazing that the fall- 
ing of an apple should have suggested the law 
of gravitation, by which the universe is gov- 
erned; by which moons swing in their orbits 
around planets, and planets around suns, and 
suns around suns, wheel within wheel, to the far- 
thest bounds of space! 

How wonderfully inventive genius has worked 
in devising and perfecting machinery! The 
farmer on our western plains under a spreading 
canopy, out of the blaze and heat of the sun, 
rides like a king his harvester, which cuts the 
golden grain, and threshes it, and puts it in bags, 
doing the work of several men. Prof. Elisha 
Gray invented the telautograph, Which enabled 
one to transmit by wire, and with an ordinary 
pen or pencil at a distance of a score of miles, an 



[95] 



The Easter Hope 



exact facsimile of one's handwriting. Doctor 
Nansen, in the polar regions of the " farthest 
north," by means of the graphophone used to 
listen to the sweet singing of his wife, though she 
was in her distant Norwegian home. Doctor Tal- 
mage has now for some time been in heaven, but 
by the same ingenious device, being dead he yet 
speaketh as Abel never did, for since his transla- 
tion his familiar vocalizations have fallen upon my 
own ears in a graphic and glowing tribute to the 
Bible. Gladstone's voice also is thus yet sound- 
ing down the corridors of time in a glorification 
of the Sabbath because of its " blessed surcease 
of toil." 

In Paris recently were stored away cylinders 
or records preserving the musical tones of some 
of our great singers, to be heard again, if there 
is no mishap, exactly one hundred years hence. 

What cannot the mind accomplish, with only 
half a chance, hemmed in though it be by finite 
conditions! It makes microscopic examinations. 
It watches pulpy stuff outlining itself in the lower 
organisms, sees it tracing the spinal column, and 
gets so far into the secrets of natural life as all 
but to detect the primordial germ itself. That, 
however, eludes the attention, though constantly 
stimulating to renewed effort to lay bare the 
first cause. 

Nay, man is determined to know himself, and 
he subjects to the closest scrutiny every part of 
his material frame, and at every stage of growth. 



[96] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



He studies his " substance/' which, the Psalmist 
implies, is hidden from all but God ; he studies it 
as " made in secret, and curiously wrought in the 
lowest parts " ; he understands it from the first 
pulsations or throbbings or stirrings of life up 
to the full development, until he can say with a 
truer appreciation of the facts than David had, 
" I am fearfully and wonderfully made." 

From the microscopic he turns to the telescopic. 
He calculates how far away starry worlds are. He 
weighs them in the balance, and informs us how 
many earths would be required to make the sun — 
over 300,000, says the astronomer Young. He 
learns about their chemical constitution, and by 
his spectroscope with its revelation of black bands 
he confidently affirms where iron exists at a dis- 
tance of millions of miles. With delicate instru- 
ments he ascertains the various ingredients of 
which distant suns are composed by analyzing 
light that left its sources before the creation of our 
first parents, before the dawn of history. With 
his photographic art he catches on sensitive 
plates impressions of stellar orbs hitherto undis- 
covered and undiseoverable. With the penetrat- 
ing X-rays he reveals the very bones of the 
human frame, so that one can now have a picture 
of his own skeleton, the robing neither of apparel 
nor of flesh being able to hide the inner mecha- 
nism, and the bullet lodged in some secret place 
being clearly seen by the operating surgeon, who 
can thus remove it with neatness and dispatch. 



[97] 



The Easter Hope 



Marconi with his wireless telegraphy sends mes- 
sages across the ocean and brings different ships 
hurtling over rough seas through thick fog to 
the relief of a White Star Liner in dire distress, 
and to the saving of her passengers from watery 
graves, as the great floating palace, disabled and 
helpless, finally goes to the bottom. It would 
have been to the saving also of the Titanics 
fifteen hundred victims, had it not been for the 
failure of the human agent, who perfidiously 
refused to respond to the startling S. O. S. sent 
forth, Save, Oh, Save! Alexander Graham Bell, 
who made the telephone possible and gave his 
name to the whole vast system, has called atten- 
tion to a most remarkable recent achievement of 
wireless telegraphy and telephony. A person at 
the station at Arlington, Virginia, talked by 
word of mouth with a man on the Eiffel Tower 
in Paris, and was overheard by a third party at 
Honolulu in the mid-Pacific. The distance cov- 
ered was about eight thousand miles, more than 
a third of the circumference of the earth. Pro- 
fessor Bell added that this "surely foreshadows 
the time when we may be able to talk with a man 
in any part of the planet by telephone and without 
wires." 

And now the air has been conquered. We can 
fly like birds, skim the seas like gulls, and rise 
toward the sun like eagles, reaching an altitude 
far beyond the point of visibility to eager eyes 
straining upward through the blue ether from 

[98] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



the earth down here below*. Aeroplanes for war- 
fare are already a familiar sight, and for com- 
merce are doubtless soon to become common, and 
there shall be a fulfilment of Tennyson's poetic 
prophecy : 

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, 
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly 

bales ; 
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a 

ghastly dew 
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue. 

The fastest express train of the " limited " type 
has been able to run from New York to Chicago 
in twenty hours, but in the new postal line about 
to be established by the American government 
only half that time will be required for an aero- 
plane loaded with mail to- traverse the distance 
between these two points. Such a stirring of the 
upper currents almost takes our breath away, and 
will add another to the wonders of modern ac- 
complishment. 

We not only sail through the heights of the 
atmosphere, but we also plunge through the 
depths of the ocean. The year 191 6 will ever be 
memorable for a remarkable and almost miracu- 
lous feat, when the first submarine ventured to 
cross from Germany to America, from Bremen 
to Baltimore, and succeeded. The Deutschland 
will ever have a secure place in history in view of 
her impressive accomplishment. She passed safely 

[99] 



The Easter Hope 



underneath the most formidable "blockading fleet 
known to any age. She rose and traveled serenely 
on the surface, but at the sight of enemy ships 
she quietly submerged. She even escaped the 
storms that lashed the surface of the great deep. 
She simply cuddled down into oceanic depths 
where all was calm. As her captain said, " It 
was just like sinking into a soft, blue nest." 
Surely, wonders never cease. 

Because of the geometrical regularity of the 
lines astronomically observed on Mars, and be- 
cause of their nice articulation at the junctions, 
Prof. Percival Lowell concludes that these are 
canals, conducting the melting snows of the polar 
caps down over the ruddy planet, which is marked 
by a scarcity of water, and his inference is, that 
there is a high order of intelligent, constructive 
life on our neighboring globe, and Professor 
Todd of Amherst endorses this conclusion. 

From atom to fixed star the human mind has 
swept with wondrous accumulation of knowl- 
edge. 

And yet, mentally as well as physically, man 
is still asleep. He has not come to his best by 
any means. When he awakes he will be a giant, 
rejoicing as a strong man to run a race. When 
the resurrection morn dawns, his intellect will 
first be roused to the exercise of its highest, most 
godlike powers. He shall be satisfied, when he 
awakes in the intellectual likeness of God. He 
is not satisfied now. He is allured on by what 



[ ioo] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



is just beyond his mental grasp. What, for in- 
stance, is beyond that last thing of which he can 
conceive in boundless space? Not last either, 
for what is next to that, and what beyond that, 
and so on ad infinitum? And he sinks back para- 
lyzed in effort, and he longs for the time when he 
shall be freed from the limitations by which he 
is now circumscribed. 

Not that he has made a failure. He has done 
nobly. He has made wide explorations, but after 
all, like the discoverer of the laws of gravity, he 
has only been picking up a few pebbles on the 
beach, while the great ocean lies unexplored. He 
has scarcely begun to find the treasures stored 
away in the house of many mansions. He has 
not yet had the freedom of the universe, for the 
small temple of human knowledge, which he has 
imperfectly explored, is as nothing in comparison 
with that temple which expands around us to 
infinity, "the vast temple of the world which," 
said Professor Park of Andover, " has the stars 
for the gilding of its roof, and mines of gold for 
the pillars that sustain its floor, and the rose and 
the lily and the jessamine ever renewing them- 
selves in the carpet that blooms for us to tread 
upon while we are walking through the temple, 
resonant as its wide spaces are with the hymns 
of the forest, and the eternal anthem of the waves 
of the sea." 

Verily, the house not made with hands has 
many hidden chambers whose secrets will be dis- 

[ioi] 



The Easter Hope 



closed only to that quickened intellect which 
comes from a mental resurrection. There is to 
be not only new sensibility of body but fresh 
vigor of mind. There is to be a resuscitation of 
latent faculties as well as of dormant senses. We 
are to wake up all through our being. We shall 
be satisfied when we awake in the likeness of God 
intellectually, when we shall have his comprehen- 
sion of things, when we shall know, according to 
the promise in the word of inspiration, even as we 
have been known. 

Who does not desire a share in such a resur- 
rection, with its increased sensibility and es- 
pecially its enlarged mentality? Who would call 
back to earth redeemed saints, whose opportuni- 
ties for acquiring knowledge must infinitely 
transcend ours, and whose intellectual pursuits 
must be conducted under the direct and personal 
supervision of the Omniscient himself, as forth 
from the city whose gates are never shut they go 
on celestial excursions among stars which cannot 
be numbered ! " Such knowledge is too wonder- 
ful for me" now, but it will not be when the 
mind shall have been clothed with divine power, 
when it shall have awaked at eternity's dawn to 
heavenly illumination. Then and not till then 
shall we begin to be satisfied. 

Once more, the resurrection includes an awak- 
ing in the moral likeness of God. We should not 
be satisfied with the most exquisite sensibility, 
nor with the highest intellectuality, unless these 

[ 102] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



were supplemented by a refined spirituality. That 
completes the man, " spirit and soul and "body." 

The body is to be transformed, but that is not 
sufficient. The soul or mind is to be clarified, but 
the natural man (that is, the intellectual man, 
the soul or psychic man) may have no spiritual 
discernment. The spirit too is therefore to be 
purified into conformity with the holy character 
of God. We might have a glorious body, and 
yet be miserable. We might have a splendid in- 
tellect, and yet be unhappy. We shall be satis- 
fied only when the night of sin has passed away, 
when all moral shadows have vanished, when we 
have awaked and come into the sunlight of per- 
fect righteousness. Conscience must be at rest, 
giiilt must be washed away. The spot on the 
hand of Lady Macbeth must be removed, and yet 
for this all the waters of old ocean will not avail. 
The blood of Jesus Christ, however, does cleanse 
from all sin, whose stains must be effaced or there 
can be no peace. 

The source of our greatest disquietude is not 
physical, much as we should like bodily transfor- 
mation so that there would be no more sickness 
and disease, no more consumption and cancer; it 
is not mental, much as we should like intellectual 
expansion so as to fathom more of the mysteries 
by which we are surrounded ; but the great disturb- 
ing force is spiritual ; we should like to get rid of 
moral evil, so that we and ours would be forever 
safe from its awful blight. Neither trifling imper- 



[ 103] 



The Easter Hope 



fection of body, nor slight limitation of mind, but 
taint of character is what causes us most anxiety, 
is what we fear most for those we love. A resur- 
rection which will exchange this frail mortal 
body for a glorious immortal one, which will 
emancipate and wonderfully develop the intellect, 
and above all which will give the spirit entire free- 
dom from sin; that is the likeness in which we 
shall awake when the night of physical infirmity 
and of mental obscurity and of spiritual darkness 
shall have ended, and the resurrection morn 
shall have dawned. 

How inexpressibly delightful will be associa- 
tion with the beautiful and the cultivated and the 
holy! There will be transfigured forms, per- 
fectly radiant There will be master minds, 
giant intellects. There will be purest, choicest 
spirits. How on reflection can we wish back dear 
ones who have joined that innumerable and 
highly favored company! We should rather 
look forward to the certainty, through the Chris- 
tian hope that is sure and stedfast, of sharing 
in the glorious consummation. We can under- 
stand the triumphant feeling of the golden- 
mouthed Chrysostom, when he said, "As when 
men are called to some high office, multitudes 
with praises on their lips assemble to escort them 
at their departure to their stations, so do all with 
abundant praise join to send forward, as to 
greater honor, those of the pious who have de- 
parted." We can appreciate this sentiment in 

[ 104] 



A Threefold Resurrection 



view of the future we have been portraying. We 
should make sure of attaining unto this threefold 
resurrection of increased sensibility to every 
pleasure, of enlarged intellectual grasp, and of 
unhindered spiritual fellowship with God and 
with the spirits of the just made perfect Then 
shall we be satisfied when we awake in the bodily, 
the mental, and the moral likeness of our Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ 

It is not a correct representation which is 
given in " The Tempest " of Shakespeare, that 
" our little life is rounded with a sleep." There 
is to be a glorious awaking. Human lives need 
a future for their completing, they are not prop- 
erly rounded out on earth. Limited to this ter- 
restrial sphere, they are like the arch of prismatic 
colors with the two cut-off ends resting on the 
landscape at widely separated points, as com- 
pared with the inspired Revelator's rainbow in 
heaven " round about the throne," with no break 
in the beauteous span of celestial brightness. The 
here and the hereafter need to be joined, if there 
are to be no half circles, Which are by no means 
satisfying. With Longfellow's conception, how- 
ever, we are satisfied, as with him we say : 

The great design unfinished lies, 
Our lives are incomplete. 

But in the dark unknown 

Perfect their circles seem, 
Even as a bridge's arch of stone 

Is rounded in the stream. 



[105] 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED 

255 pages. Price, 75 cents. The West- 
minster Press, Witherspoon Building, Phila- 
delphia. Four Editions, and Translations 
into Spanish and Japanese. 

Bishop J. P. Newman, D. D., LL. D. : " It is a timely 
book. The common people will read it gladly. Scholars 
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220 pages. Price, $1.00; postage, 10 cents. 

The Pilgrim Press, 14 Beacon Street, 
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Prof. Williston Walker, D. D., Yale University, in 
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various aspects through keen observation and far-reaching 
travel. The result is a little volume of much literary 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE TREND OF THE CENTURIES 

419 pages. Price, $1.00 net, postpaid. 

The Pilgrim Press, 14 Beacon Street, 
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The American Journal of Theology, Chicago University : 
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PROBLEMS 

221 pages. Price, $1.00 net. Fleming 
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